Well, if you can properly formulate these questions, distinguish a good answer from a bad one, AND know how to write code, you should be talking to investors (or prospective customers) rather than applying for coding jobs.

Unless, of course, starting a company is not something you want to do.

Then work at a large firm which will let you do these things, and fund you should it not work out. Our industry is still young, and problems to solve are myriad. If you can tell what the good ones and bad ones are then you are much to valuable to work on someone else's idea.

"Then just get your dream job; god, it's not that hard!"

I invite you to search developer jobs in a large (3 million+) metro area that is not San Francisco, Seattle, or New York. Developer jobs you will find:

- Shitty ad-tech company

- Knockoff ad-tech

- Shitty, knockoff ad-tech

- Fintech, but shitty

- Fintech, but even shittier

- Fintech, but actually a scam

- Fin-ad-tech

- Fintech for dogs

- Adtech for dogs

- Giant telecom where you will be put in a prison of a narrowly defined role where shitty developers go to slowly die

- Remote office of a FAANG where you can be put in a prison of a narrowly defined role doing shitty ad-tech to help an evil psychopathic hundred-billionaire get even more of a death grip on all aspects of our lives, but at least you're paid well

- (Rarely) Internal developer for a company that is actually doing something useful and interesting, but where you'll end up maintaining a shitty out-of-support enterprise system built on a base platform that does nothing where the real business logic is all embedded in their inner-platform key-value tables by engineering interns.

- Fintech

Hehe, I really like this answer. I feel a bit cursed and also lucky at the same time in my current role... I was given ownership of a project that is solving a $100M problem at a big company, but now that it is working well... random people from other teams are showing up to take control of it and kill it with their idiotic ideas.

And I suppose the alternative is to start your own company, take VC money, and thus become one of those shitty ad-tech, knockoff ad-tech, fintech but shitty, fintech but actually a scam, etc. companies? But at least you'll probably end up owning >1% of the company!

I guess I'd say if your idea revolves around shitty ad-tech or fin-tech, then no, that's not a good answer. But if you have a genuinely new niche ... maybe? It's a little like "burn this codebase and start all over". It's a gut reaction we all have, and 90% of the time it's a bad idea. But that 10% of the time ...

Disagree - for many people, rolling the dice is too risky.

If you have something nice to fall back on (rich family, nest egg) or no dependents, then sure.

You’re still rolling the dice if you go work in a startup, you might as well not bother and go to a FAAG (excluding Netflix) for that. Or is it MAGAF (Microsoft apple google amazon Facebook)? Lol.

In india the acronym is WITCH which is apt given the track record of these consulting shops.

I disagreed at first read, but you're right. These questions are geared for tech interviews in a startup environment, which assumes the candidate can take on risk. So why not grab for the brass ring?

If you want a regular no-risk paycheque then check out government jobs. Runway? Oh yeah we've been collecting taxes for centuries. Product-market fit? Yeah, we have these big guys with badges and guns who will come to your house if you "don't fit." We pay an absolute pittance compared to private, but your job will be there your entire working life.

There are tons of engineering jobs that are not startup risky or government boring.

You can be an engineer in retail, medical, insurance, finance, etc. there are tons of stable engineering jobs working for companies that don’t deliver a digital service or physical product.

I think the point they were making was it’s risky to join a startup, and it doesn’t seem like that much more of a risk to start a startup if you have the stomach for risk already.

There is a ton more risk to be founder than an early startup employee. A ton more benefits too, but the costs real. For one thing, if you are pre-funding, then you need to go acquire that funding without being paid in the interim. If you can afford that risk, then it might be good option.

I wouldn't come to that conclusion at all, they're completely different skillsets. FWIW I'm quite prepared to join a startup that seems like it has some great ideas and good people but isn't quite sure yet how it's going to become profitable. You do so always knowing there's a moderate risk it might not work out and you'll be back out hunting for another job within 12 months or whatever.

In experience it is not the content of the answers. Most cases you simply realise they have not answered those questions themselves/

I don't understand how that follows. It would seem that "having a good answer to these questions" is the key, not knowing how to ask the question?

You also need to have a product idea… That’s actually the hardest part.

You're received lots of responses pointing out why this is inaccurate, but one point I didn't see covered was that the degree of confidence required in "distinguishing a good answer from a bad one" as a prospective employer is _much_ lower than that required as a founder. Additionally, evaluating whether something is good is easier than coming up with something good.

Assuming you want to be talking to investors. Some people prefer coding, and may want to do it in a well-vetted startup.

This makes me wish I lived in a tech hub so I could have some semblance of an idea of what the market wants. The Midwest sucks for tech work. Maybe I should be reading TechCrunch more often lol

I see this sentiment all the time, and it is so backwards. Startups in tech hubs tend to solve problems that people in tech hubs have.

"I'm rich and lazy, I want someone to deliver me food from my favorite restaurant and I don't care if it costs 2-3x as much and takes 90 minutes."

"I need some place to put my piles of IPO money that might appreciate because returns are down elsewhere, and also I think securities laws are confusing and bad."

These startups attract a lot of venture money because investors in tech hubs have similar problems and so they are attracted to them.

But they are fundamentally not productive. They are market makers or middlemen or financial products. There is a much lower ceiling on what people will ever be willing to pay for these kind of things relative to, say, some novel industrial software that gets purchased by multi-billion dollar companies. Those industrial companies are tech companies, make no mistake, and they are almost universally not headquartered in SF or NYC. There's also a much higher ceiling on the potential market because your customers are actually making things.

I think it depends on the problem space you're interested in solving. I'm interested in databases and data tooling, of which a very sizeable chunk of the users for that are in SV.

That's a pretty narrow definition of what's productive. Information is capital. Being able to link up a customer with an on-demand driver adds a lot of value into the system.

You're right that middlemen are productive in the generality.

But

> Being able to link up a customer with an on-demand driver adds a lot of value into the system.

This is only true if the driver's rates are something the customer is willing to pay. Finding that match is the primary job of a middleman; a lot of American services matching this basic description gloss over that part of the match entirely.

Couldn't agree with this more, sadly the other missing piece is the personality required to do that. When added to the other three traits that are already uncommon to find in one person, you're talking about a very unique individual.

Well, then as patronizing as it may sound, if you are looking for regular developer job, you should care more about the technology stack (as it affects your resell value for the next job), what big features the company recently delivered (to see whether you'll be stuck doing soulless maintenance) the cash part of your salary (since you don't really control the value of that equity), the amount of work hours per week, and how much of an asshole your boss is going to be.

Funny enough these are the exact questions that founders need to ask themselves before committing to an idea. YC has overly broadened this to “make something people want” which at first order needs to be true. The questions you’ve laid out here are the direct implications of “make something people want”.

Companies manufacture crap all of the time that people don't really need, and these companies spend significant sums convincing consumers that they do, in fact, need or want them. I don't think people need to want your product now. You can also make something that people will want as well as what people do want.

Most startups don't have significant sums to spend to convince consumers that they want or need a product. Unless yours does, there's no way to succeed other than to make something people want today.

Not necessarily as a startup. Big companies with established products, existing revenue streams, and profits can afford the marketing budget to convince a wide swath of consumers they need this new thing that they really don’t. But startups with just one product or service generally can’t afford to be pushing on a string like that.

Yeah and "spend less than you make" is the other one.

As a founder I can tell you that candidates who enter the interview process with their own good ideas for answers to these questions are lot more attractive, i.e. anyone that has done even a modicum of their own research stands head and shoulders above their peers.

At the end of the day, if you don't know these basic things about a company, why have you applied for a job there?

> At the end of the day, if you don't know these basic things about a company, why have you applied for a job there?

Because I need money, and you might be the 3XXth company I've applied to. Job hunting when there's something unappealing about yourself can be quite a pain, but rent is still due at the end of the month.

If you're applying to 300+ companies, something is wrong. When I've gone looking for work I've talked to maybe 5-10 companies at most. Specialization and a good network of contacts makes all the difference.

Can you expand on that? Every time I've looked for a new job I've had to use the "carpet bomb" approach with my resume to get anywhere. Any time I've been out of work historically, it's taken a minimum of 3 months to find a job.

Carpet bombing can get interviews, but it tends to waste a lot of time and be relatively ineffectual. Last time I looked at getting interviews, a number of the interesting job listings were behind absolutely horrific web sites that basically require mangling all the relevant content from a resume into a web form. Ask around between a few friends and former coworkers on Linkedin and it's pretty easy to get a resume into the hands of the hiring manager bypassing all the HR filtration garbage. From there it becomes an actual two way conversation to figure out if there's a good fit on both sides.

True, but I absolutely hate having to ask my network anything. I'd gladly help them, but I despise having to advertise what's going on in my life.

It's a 2 way street. If a job or contract that seems like a good fit for someone I know, then I pass it on to them. Over time it's mutually beneficial.

I think the difference is having a network. A soft introduction, even from an acquaintance, is much more likely to get you an interview. It doesn't get you the job, you need to do well on the interview and appeal more than the other candidates, but you get the classic "foot in the door." Without that, it is a crap shoot. Another approach to the same thing is a professional middle-man, such as a recruiting agency.

I guess it must also depend on location and level of experience. I haven't had to go out of my way to land a job in 20 years, but I get not everybody's circumstances are the same. FWIW I'm not at all specialized, pretty much a jack-of-all-trades type dev, and while I do have a good network of contacts, I didn't rely on them for finding the new role I'm moving into.

Location definitely matters. Certain types of work are more popular in some regions than others. The level of trust required for landing remote work jobs also strongly leans on having good references from one's network of mutual acquaintances.

These days it's usually the case that the company came to me, rather than me applying to them. I'll do full research before the final round but for an initial intro? I'll glance at your website, otherwise I'm there to hear your story and decide if I want to take the time to learn more. Lately early stage companies seem to expect you to have a fully formed motivation to work there before the first conversation which is just not the way this works, sorry.

I feel like most startups I’ve talked to in the past couple years realize this. They are surprised if I know anything about them at all during the initial convo

To be fair, these answers aren't always obvious when looking into a startup company, especially in the early stages. I'm not even sure many companies actually have firm answers to all of these. The founders may have lofty ideas, but often they aren't very public about them to avoid tipping their hand.

My two most recent jobs I was reached out to by a recruiter who could describe the general market the company is in but actually getting into detail and nuance required speaking with someone at the company.

OTOH well establish startups and businesses almost always have the answers to these questions front and center on their website. Some basic due diligence on a candidate's part is always welcome.

You're asking candidates to answer questions like "What problem is your company solving?". Maybe I'm misreading your comment, but if the founder is looking to hires to answer these questions, that sounds very concerning, and probably a place I'd avoid.

Enthusiasm is great, but the founders/current employees should have an understanding that far outstrips anything an outsider can provide (unless you're dealing with someone who already has deep knowledge of a well known domain, which is a bit of a different angle).

I may be mistaken, but I think you misunderstood the comment.

The questions are meant to be asked by the job candidate, not by the employer.

"candidates who enter the interview process with their own good ideas for answers to these questions". "Candidates ... their own good ideas for answers". Yes: the candidate asks these questions, but the commenter seemed to suggest that they also want candidates who have good answers ready for those questions.

That seems like a bit of a funny thing to expect from a candidate who doesn't necessarily know the domain, and certainly wouldn't be an authority on the company.

Ah, got it. I interpreted that as meaning that a candidate who did have such answers would really stand out.

I.e., those aren't considered basic qualifications for the job, but are awesome if a candidate is actually like that.

I would agree with that for dev positions. But when I was hiring PMs, these types of questions were actually a key part of the interview. The particulars of the answers mattered a lot less than the fact they did _some_ research, and formed a limited mental model of business from which we could discuss different scenarios, tradeoffs, pivots, features, etc ... Major bonus points for them basically turning the tables around and interviewing/grilling me on how we were going tackle "recent announcement from competitor" or "trend in market" and asking good followup questions to dig into how that could relate to what impact they could have.

> why have you applied for a job there

Because the company head-hunted me?

It's for the same reason your recruiters or engineering managers only take a 10 second glance at a resume and never look at the side projects in Github profiles for their potential candidates; ain't nobody got time for that.

In today market chances are that the candidate was cold called

Unfortunately LeetCode problems stop those creative engineers early in the process.

I guess all fine questions if you apply for unknown startup position. In any serious company, first would give you a big fat warning for ignorance of not preparing for interview at all and checking company. Normally that's 5 mins effort max.

Second would mark you as clueless about whole business segment company operates is, and then why hire clearly inexperienced you, unless asking for intern/junior position.

Third is fine in any environment I guess, but can be weird in say banking.

What happened about asking about team, job, workflow, methodologies and tools, management structure, office structure, WFH and so on?

By the time you get to the interview the answers to these questions should be obvious if not then you’re probably just shopping around for jobs at whatever company comes your way.

I like these questions a lot. Nicely done.

The set I use is below, with explanations. Note that this is entirely a b2b list. I don't think there is a meaningful list one can ask for consumer startups, since in my view the consumer space is purely the domain of the ycombinator "throw it at the wall and then double down on what sitcks" - there is no engineering, marketing, etc. that you can apply to a b2c startup that isn't working and I don't think you can ask anything other than "how fast are you growing?" for consumer stuff.

For everything else, though ...

1. What is the critical problem on the customer side? How intense is the problem?

The company should be able to explain one or two very crisp, very clear customer-side issues. This goes beyond "what problem are you solving" because solving problems aren't enough to get a buyer to take action. Diffuse or "nice to have" problems means you never have a champion or buyer who will simply say "take my money" and most likely the reason for the diffuse/dull/etc. issues are behavioral or structural and that no one will actually pay to solve them.

I cannot emphasize enough that PLANS TO ADDRESS STRUCTURAL ISSUES AT CUSTOMERS ARE ACTUALLY THE LINES IN A STARTUP SUICIDE NOTE.

The other thing you see a lot is that people try and shore up crap businesses by throwing a lot of things in the solution to address a lot of problems at once with the idea that the sum is more valuable than its parts - that is a body shop mentality, not a good startup position. Startups should have something that they address that people want to buy, not be the business equivalent of a "52-in-1" Atari cartridge. A collection of dull, diffuse issues means the solution will usually not have buyer priority. Worse is purely hypothetical """problem""" where product is just a vitamin or insurance = no buyer outside of compliance, which is super low margin and low urgency (lots of security plays have this, or worse, fail to recognize it). Let garbage vendor-integrators like IBM or Cisco weakly assemble an array of crap, low-margin products into a "solution", that is not a good startup business.

2. What is the solution? What does the solution directly and completely solve in terms of the critical problem? Why now? Is the solution a necessary part of other changes or is it in and of itself sufficient to have day one+ value without big changes on the customer side?

Another issue you see a lot is that the solution only works if the customers make other changes that would also partially alleviate the problem, and so the solution is actually part of a collection of important customer-side changes that are going to be impossible to get done in a repeatable way. The solution has to deliver value without large changes on the part of the customer, especially changes that would have helped alleviate pain _already_ since there's an obvious issue there that the solution startup is missing. Customer-side-changes also means sales repeatability will be very poor which is a death sentence for startups.

5. What is the customer type? Who is the buyer? What existing budget are you redirecting if any?

This is another issue that shows up a lot: businesses are broken into groups of functions with independent owners. If the startup's business spans multiple business areas and multiple business owners are going to need to cooperate (not just agree, but they have different timing, different priorities, and so on) that is a big problem.

If buying the solution has to come from multuple discrete budget line items, that is a big problem because that implies trying to coordinate what is effectively a sale to each of them, with different trade-offs and different priorities and timeframes, and then conclude the real sale after all of that. This is a serious momentum and timing problem because it's hard enough to rendevous with need-and-now customer side without having multiple gates.

If _both_ are required, that's a death sentence.

3. What is the value of solving the problem?

... And the actual cash on the table value of solving the problem is critical. Even if you have a very real problem, and even if that problem has acute frustration/pain/etc. on the customer side, it doesn't matter to a startup. There are, unfortunately, lots of real problems, even critical ones, that customers view (and can perhaps justify with a pure $ argument) as not being high value. No value = no margin. You need to be reducing CAPEX, OPEX, increase efficiency, increase user experience (and be very, very careful of this one because a lot of people kid themselves), etc.

6. What megatrends are in favor of this solution?

Also known as, "how much education are you going to have to do?"

Also, you have to ask yourself, "are mega trends independently solving the problem in a different way? are megatrends sucking the oxygen out of the room in terms of buyer attention?" Lots of businesses have "transformation" plans dictated by executives that intend to solve (or not) some business problem for purposes of their brand, and most of the time these are actually just trends at the CIO level, and they may not even be aligned with real pain points. These can sink you if the trend is against you.

7. Who is the team? Why is this team the right one? Why are they the ones to deliver a technical solution?

(self explanatory - they need experience)

8. What is the GTM/sales motion to get to the person in the customer most impacted by the critical problem?

9. What other business challenges are involved with the solution?

10. What is the demo? What is the sales talk track? Who is the buyer? What will be the objections of the operational team?

11. Who are the competitors? Which of them is good? How much traction are they seeing?

To some extent you have to help them answer one of these questions. One of these answers has to be flawed, and you fill it in, then they see you as a companion on their adventure.

> 1. What problem is your company solving?

I kinda agree, but this question should be resolvable by looking at the source material. The reason why "does your product have good market fit?" is so effective is that it forces the people to justify why, or why they don't have market fit.

This gives you lots of chances to ask followups and figure out if they are hand waving, misinformed, know what they are doing, or just plain naive.

The other two questions are very good, and well worth asking.

The essence of all these questions is to figure out if they have put any thought into the business side(if they are a startup) or how well the business is doing, if they are more established. The crucial thing that often gets lost is that tech is there to fulfil a business function, not the other way around. Figuring out the business model helps you predict what _should_ be built later on.

It's not about the marketing cooy itself, it's about knowing if the team is aligned with that.

Typically, the company expects you've done your homework before asking them these questions...

I expect recruiters and hiring managers to do their research too, but every time they reach out I'm still astounded how poorly they've done it. Then they still have the gall to expect you research them, which takes more than a light glance at their page written in a way to sell themselves.

It's about time we push back on this. If they need employees so bad, how about they stop making demands which resemble being in a position of power?

Many company websites and resources like to describe what they do with word salad bingo instead of getting to the point. At best you can know what market they are in.

Even more so for startups who don't really know what their solution is.

what is on the website and what is actually happening on the ground are two different things that may or may not match

I don't know WHAT problem my company is solving either but they are profitable.

Much better than the startup culture buzzwords in the article, thanks.

There is a huge difference between the sort of PR crap that companies post on websites and actually sitting down with a human being and have them explain it to you. "What problem is your company solving?" is pretty general, to be fair, but it would be a red flag for a startup that is selling a product but cannot articulate what problem customers have that the product is solving. It is in fact a pretty central differentiator between startups that succeed and startups that fail.

They are all good questions, but you would probably want to say more along the lines of "I understand that X is your companies product. Can you go into some more detail about what specific problems this product is solving for your customers?"

Exactly this. Good luck identifying the actual problem a startup addresses from their website. Most of the websites are deliberately diffuse for prospecting purposes.

1999: We are a distributed n-tier b2b and b2c e-commerce platform

2022: We use AI on the blockchain to change the world.

I'll do cursory research which makes me intrigued enough to apply and show up to the interview. I'll do my sales pitch of myself when you ask me questions about myself. Why is it a "negative signal" for me to expect a sales pitch about what you're selling here? I know some basic facts, I can read what your polished marketing blurb, but I want to hear you speak about your team and your product and your market like a human, from first principles. Too much to ask?

(I'd probably have more specific clarifying questions as follow-ups to the open-ended ones. Judge me on those if you wish, though that's not why I'd be asking them.)

Eh that's easily parried by just asking how you would answer those questions. It's a pretty easy argument that the company seeking to hire someone should be able to answer these questions and that a direct answer will be more valuable than a statement on a webpage.

I guess it’s fine if the company doesn’t ask the candidate any questions either, right? After all they have the resume to look at.

Fair enough. How many startups/company websites clearly state what they are actually doing? The problem is particularly bad in B2B space where the descriptions are replete with buzzwords and don't convey anything more than "Lorem Ipsum"

That would presume the cursory research turns up clear answers. Or that the answers the interviewers give will match the answers online.

I have seen both presumptions invalidated enough not to think poorly of anyone asking and if the interviewer decides I’m wasting their time if I ask questions like this then it was never going to be a good fit.

It depends if you are hiring for HP or some startup that is still in stealth mode.