I must have been to hundreds of interviews by now, on either side. Here are a few questions I sometimes forget to ask and never had anyone asking me. They have nothing and everything to do with your day job. These represent about 50 of the hundred in “death by a hundred cuts”

Don’t be like me and don’t forget:

Do you have a ‘meeting culture’?

Aka meetings will take up 90% of your (and everyone else’s) time. Once I won an ‘understatement of the week’ award with saying ‘I really hate meetings’.

Seeing humans in 3D is great but most meetings either start unproductive or evolve into that really soon. Make it worse when it’s on Zoom (or whatever, choose your poison), because it’s so easy to invite more people and you won’t see people looking at each other wondering what tf they are doing there.

It depends on the role, but I found a lot of meetings correlate with misery and no productivity. Meetings get out of hand faster than a cross between a live grenade and a hot potato.

Do you have timesheets?

I always forget to ask because I assume no one in their right mind would do that in the 21st century. How wrong I am. (Yes, yes, there are exceptions for “good reasons”, like working for the US government*, but are they?)

Timesheets are the remnant of the age where the more time you spend on something the more you get done. Don’t get me wrong, this is still generally true, but if you use your brain at/to work, the correlation is not that clear, especially when 80% of your day is either meetings or waiting for someone else to finish.

Having timesheets has a high correlation with your manager (and his manager.. .and her manager) wanting you to be in an office so he can see if you are busy doing something - I’ll leave it to you to figure out the why and the logic. I could only decipher one of these.

Do you use presentations or written (long form) documents?

Writing is thinking. If you think in coherent sentences you think better when you think in 2-3 word expressions sprinkled randomly on a screen. (Plus 🚀 emojis lately…) If a whole company does this….

Also presentations are presented: all the nuance is only there when you hear it (that is, if the presenter is good, which is like 10% of presentations). Also, this means even more meetings. Yay.

High correlation with BS in the workplace: the only software that’s can both take and hide more amount of BS than PowerPoint is Excel.

If you are any kind of manager or team lead: can you replace a broken laptop or screen for your team without 2-3-4 approvals?

Can you do it with something that’s not that apparently broken?

Ah, no biggie, just the fire department will have to fill in a water request form whenever an alarm comes in. The more of this you see, the less trust the organization has in anyone there. Imagine all the initiatives you’ll get to do.

Does the office have ‘office boys’?

This, as far as I know, is a Middle Eastern concept. They are young-ish folks who are there to bring coffee, tea or whatever you (well, mostly the owner or the CEO) need.

They are paid peanuts (small ones). There are so many reasons I don’t like this, but that’s not the point. I found a high correlation between their presence and a toxic workplace culture.

The meta-question

Watch how the interviewers answer your questions.

If the answers are generic, they either don’t know (so they are the wrong people to be there) or don’t want to tell you (so it’s probably not somewhere you’d want to be)