During any interview, your interviewer will almost certainly leave 5–15 minutes at the end of the interview for you to ask them questions (ie. “do you have any question for me?”) about the company or role.
On one hand, this won’t be the most important signal in determining if you get an offer, but on the other hand, it’s extremely easy to prep for, so there’s no excuse for you not to have a great set of questions for your interviewer. I’ve seen so many candidates have a set of bad or mediocre questions prepared, that I think it’s worth discussing here how to come up with a really amazing set of questions.
Custom to the Company
The questions should be custom to the company. If you ask a question that could easily apply to any other company, then that’s generally a bad question
Example: “Can you tell me what the culture is like at Facebook?”.
- This is a bad question because it can be applied to any company. You’re not signaling anything meaningful about your interest or knowledge of the company because you could turn around an ask the same question in your next interview.
Example: “Given Facebook has grown to be a large scale thus far with 50k+ employees, how do you still maintain the pace of velocity?”
- This is a slightly better question, in that you could only ask this question for a handful of companies (e.g. FAANG companies).
Example: “What has been the strategy for incorporating the Metaverse into Facebook’s existing Family of Apps like Instagram, News Feed, WhatsApp and Messenger given those apps follows a feed experience, while the Metaverse follows a 3-D immersive experience?”
- This is a strong question, as there’s literally only one company in the world for which you could ask this question.
Custom to the role
The questions should be custom to the role. Even if your question is company-specific, it should ideally be targeted to the role you’re interviewing for.
Example: “How much latitude do engineers have when it comes to defining what is on their roadmap at Facebook?”
- This is not a great question because, almost any candidate could ask this question.
Example: “Since I’m interviewing for an ML Platform role, I’d love to know how much I can use my personal experience using PyTorch to help prioritize what we work on?”
- This is a better question because it narrows the custom number of teams/roles for that this question could apply to. However the best question for an interviewer might be:
Example: “I follow the PyTorch subReddit and they’ve mentioned a lot of open source community requests aren’t prioritized as much as Facebook internal feature needs. If i were to join the PyTorch Infra team, can I put together user feedback panels from some of the community’s power users for the team?
- This question is obviously better than the previous two, as it’s extremely custom to the company, team and role.
Custom to the interviewer
The recruiters should have give you a heads up around who will be on your interview panel, and you should think about how you can make your question custom for that specific interviewer. Imagine you’re interviewing for Instagram Ads Platform team, and one of the interviewers on your panel is a manager for the overall Facebook Ads Platform team of which your team is a customer.
Example: “How does collaboration generally work between a customer and platform team at Facebook? Do I inform your roadmap?”
- This question is not great because it doesn’t leverage anything specific about the interviewer’s role.
Example: “What’s are your team’s top priorities when it comes building a robust ads platform?”
- This question is somewhat better, but it still can apply to other ads-related roles that you’re interview for, it’s not the most ideal.
Example: “I read that Facebook has an auction system where you predict the clickthrough probability of an ad and combine that with a bid value to rank ads. Does Instagram’s ad system extend that auction system, or did Instagram build its own? Since Instagram has a larger proportion of brand advertising, and less action/click-based did they build their own infra?”
- This is a much better question, as it makes it clear you know what you’re talking about, and it’s a question that is custom to the given interviewer. It’s a question likely that interviewer would be able to answer (and nobody else).
Using chatGPT to generate questions
If you have difficulty coming up with custom interview questions for the given role and interviewer. For example, you can ask the following prompt of ChatGPT:
I'm interviewing to lead the Machine Learning Platform team at Waymo,
a self-driving car company. My interviewer is the Director of Engineering
who leads the Sensing and Perception team, and his team will be a customer
of my team. I want to ask some questions at the end of the interview that
are very custom to the interviewer and role. What are some good questions
to ask that really demonstrate I have self-driving car domain knowledge and
have done my research on the company?