A common SWE interview setup is that you talk to the manager and then a few of the engineers.
The manager will keep up a professional company facade.
But the individual engineers will usually answer pretty much any question honestly. Both because we're bad at lying, and because you don't want to end up working with someone when they discover that you lied to them.
Definitely this. Candidates have asked me some pretty hard questions and I rarely ever feel much internal resistance in giving an honest answer, for this exact reason as well as personal guilt that someone might make a major life decision in part because of a deceptive answer. A manager might not hire you if you ask a question they dislike, but unless your question to my humble engineer self is something like “how few hours a week do you manage to get away with working?” or “I hate computers, do you frequently work with computers?”, I don’t even know how I’d give you a thumbs-down without sounding disingenuous in the post-interview feedback meeting.
So much interviewing advice is bullshit, but it’s 100% true that asking good questions at the end is the ideal point to get the most accurate picture of what your job experience is going to be like. Just like my interview questions are in-part trying to gauge what it’s going to be like working with you.
People will indeed sometimes lie or spin for various reasons. There doesn’t necessarily have to be an external incentive. Sometimes internal factors are enough; e.g. to reduce cognitive dissonance. They will sometimes lie to themselves and they will sometimes lie to other people. The world is complicated.
A common SWE interview setup is that you talk to the manager and then a few of the engineers.
The manager will keep up a professional company facade.
But the individual engineers will usually answer pretty much any question honestly. Both because we're bad at lying, and because you don't want to end up working with someone when they discover that you lied to them.