Here is my running list of questions I rely on in first interviews and why I ask them. Most of them are asked personally to me during interviews throughout my career, the rest I stole them with great pleasure.
How do you help raise the bar for people around you?
I look for awareness: how they perceive others and how they look at themselves in that dynamic. The answer tells me whether they think about impact on the people they work with.
When scale and speed are not the most important abilities of a system, what becomes most important in your view?
I want to see if the candidate can reason about trade-offs and values beyond performance. Things like reliability, maintainability, usability, simplicity. That shows me how they think about systems holistically.
What is the biggest crisis you have managed?
Everyone has success and glory; few stand out in how they handled a crisis. The answer shows the magnitude of responsibility the candidate has taken in tough times.
What have you worked on hardest recently? What was the challenge?
Tell me about the most challenging problem you have tackled recently: what made it hard, and how did you navigate it? This gives me a direct read on communication. They have to get me on board with the problem, describe the situation and the technical challenges. I like to go deep on this part, less on the solution and more on the process. It also shows whether they really thought the problem through or whether they mostly value effort or tech for its own sake.
Who are the best engineers you have worked with? Why? What specific behaviors or mindsets made them stand out?
Here I try to understand what they value in other engineers and who they consider truly strong. I dig into the stories. Mediocre answers often sound like: great coder, super meticulous, detail oriented, works fast. What catches my ear is collaboration, how engineers work with others, or very specific skills. I sometimes wonder if people attribute greatness in others to the skills they feel they lack. No proof for that, just a hunch.
If you join us, what is one thing you would bring from your former workplaces for the culture?
That is a culture question. I try to figure out what they valued in their previous environment and whether they can articulate what actually contributed. Rituals, tools, attitude, or certain ways of working are among the best answers I remember. I pay attention when people talk about what they themselves would bring if they join, not just what the company had.
What is the best feedback you have ever received? What is a piece of critical feedback that changed the way you work?
I am trying to understand what they consider good feedback and whether they have been coached properly by someone who gave observation-based, actionable feedback. Many candidates talk about praise, recognition, or being told what a good job they did. That is not what I am looking for. I want people who are self-aware, who know at least some of their weaknesses or have been confronted with their own behaviour. I sometimes follow up with something harder: do you think you are coachable?
How do you use AI tools in your current workflow?
I ask this to learn what their actual experience is: how they use AI day to day, not what they think they should say.