Interview Questions

I personally have most of these questions at one time or another in my long and notorious career as a software engineer. Can't remember where we stole these from. Shame. I'd love to credit them.

• Walk me through a time when you were working on a small team, and the team disagreed with your ideas
• Tell me about a time when you had to give negative feedback to your direct superior
• Tell me about a time the system crushed your spirit and turned you into a bitter misanthrope
• Tell me about a time you overcame your bitter misanthropy and pretended to care about management's fad du jour
• What is the most entertaining pointed question you ever asked management in a meeting?
• Have you ever played buzzword bingo?
• Brainstorm how your diversity will synergize customer-focused quality transactions with our core competencies
• Tell me about a flawed evaluation metric* you have seen and what it actually rewarded
• How do you prefer to procrastinate?
• If you were to "sell out", how much would you want? No, really - how much?

[*] Works best in tag team interviews. The person not asking this question should be scribbling on a clipboard or playing with an iPad or laptop and yell out "Bingo!" at the word "metric".