Interviews Go Both Ways

We open this final section by explaining how to evaluate teams within a company—starting with the interview process itself.

Here are the core points from the lesson:

• We explain why “first principles thinking” about company financials is usually unhelpful for engineers: exponential growth makes predictions unreliable, and financial modeling without expertise leads to bad conclusions.
• We highlight that the interview stage is your first and most reliable chance to gather real signal about culture and team fit; you should “reverse interview” the company rather than defaulting to superficial questions.
• We point out common bad questions (e.g., “What’s your favorite thing about working here?” or “How’s the food?”) because they produce biased, obvious answers and don’t reveal anything meaningful about career growth or challenges.
• We recommend instead asking questions tied directly to your top priorities—work-life balance, growth, team culture, on-call load—so that you can evaluate whether the environment actually aligns with what you need.