The one question that made me turn down a job offer

Last month, I went through a full interview process for a tech lead role. It went well — I liked the...

Last month, I went through a full interview process for a tech lead role. It went well — I liked the team and product, and they seemed to like me — until the very last minute in the CTO interview. One question completely threw me off balance:

– Why is it you? I’m not asking about your resume, I’m asking about you. -Well, I did all [this things…] and the job is what I aspire to do and… -That’s your CV, and I don’t care what you want, but why should we want YOU?

I was so unsettled that the rest of the interview was an absolute mess. I more or less dodged questions. Something in me just didn’t want to answer that question. It felt wrong. The whole process was most likely screwed at that point anyway, but that interview was so unpleasant that I decided to pull the plug.

At first, you could think: well, this is a good question, no? It shows the candidate has reflexive thinking. It could highlight things beyond the usual: soft skills, personality, etc. It could also show that I can answer “harder”, unsettling questions. It took me a bit of time to understand what felt wrong.

The first thing that helped me pinpoint why it felt wrong was: who can answer this question well? None of the great devs I know would. At best, they’d give something commonplace; in most cases, they would collapse. And I truly believe they are great lead devs. So who do I know that would answer this question well? Bullshitters, of course. This is a godsend for anybody who hired a career coach, looks at themself in the mirror in the morning with a motivational speech. OSS maintainers? The people who will save your production server in the middle of the night? Inspiring, low-key, understated tech leads who will make your team run faster than ever? Not so much.

Then it started to click in my head. Why does this have to be about ME more than my work anyway? I truly think the most important data points are the work I’ve done and what I want to do. I really want my work to speak for itself and if I do what I aspire to, well I’ll do it well and put effort into it, no? I made a huge effort on my resume so that it told a structured story — which the team loved. But I want to share measurable data points: projects I’ve done, technical tests, honest aspirations. Everything else? I can just bullshit my way through it and make things up anyway. And I explicitly didn’t want to mention my trail running training program or snowboard-mountaineering adventures. They’re cheap ways to build yourself a “strong-minded” character, which is totally irrelevant to my job and totally none of your f*ing employer’s business.

Yeah, this was that. Why me? Like, the whole me? From snowboarding to parenting? How I handle emotions, my character? You want my eating habits and sex life while we’re at it, or what? And… actually, maybe yes. Seeing how many people share their training and eating routines on LinkedIn as a way to build their “optimized, entrepreneurial character”, they wanted that. Fuck that. I code, I help other people code, I build web products, and that’s it. Anything else is just comedy around the job.

But this kept getting worse. Isn’t that your job to know if it’s me in the first place? Shouldn’t the technical and product interviews show that anyway? There’s one kind of C-level executive I hate: the kind where you come to them with a question they really have to answer themself — that you escalated for a reason — and all you get is: “Well, you to tell me.” THANK YOU FOR NOTHING. It really smells like I’m going to have to do their job, while they’ll be judging me, and I’ll have to prove myself constantly rather than focusing on my work.

So I decided to pull the plug. I could have waited for the answer as a data point, but I just didn’t have the heart. Maybe I was defensive, maybe not. That’s not the point in the end. The very fact that the discussion was so different between the team and the CTO was a smell anyway. The whole thing opened my eyes to a few other red flags as well.

So what to think of all of that? Well, I have a strong belief that interviews are just as likely to validate the interviewer’s biases as they are to reveal the truth about the interviewee. As such, a question can tell more about the interviewer than its answer can tell about the interviewee. That was the case here, and maybe that’s a good thing in the end. When you hire, just be sure to ask questions that show who you are too, as an employer.

Origninally published on The Couloir