Sign in
3 min read

The limits of interview questions

When I worked as a developer and team lead, I went through a lot of interviews. Over time, I built up a list of odd and unhelpful questions. There were many, but here are the ones that stood out the most. I’m not trying to guess what the interviewers were thinking. I’m just showing how these questions sound in conversation and the impression they leave.

The Quirky Ones

  • What’s your favorite color and why?
  • What animal do you associate yourself with?
  • How would you describe your perfect day?

These questions sound unusual, but they don’t tell you anything about how a person works. The answers are wide open to interpretation, so the focus shifts from real experience to guessing the right image. A candidate either recites something they’ve prepared or improvises a response, and neither option says much about how they approach problems. It’s hard to draw any conclusions about work behavior or decision-making from answers like these. More often than not, they add noise rather than help with evaluation.

Passive-Aggressive Traps

  • Aren’t you worried you won’t keep up with our pace?
  • Don’t you think you might be overqualified for this role?
  • How do you explain the long gaps in your career?
  • How much were you making before?

These questions often feel like an attempt to uncover a hidden problem. They focus less on professional experience and more on external circumstances, which rarely help you understand how someone will work in a team. This stands out even more in startups. A person’s past salary doesn’t reflect their current motivation or expectations. A long career break might have nothing to do with competence. And a concern about being overqualified means nothing without context about the role. It’s easy to misread signals like these and turn down someone who might actually be a great fit.

There’s one question that sits on the edge of what’s fair: “Why have you changed jobs so often?” It can be a reasonable one — if you understand that the answer often reflects the natural lifecycle of projects, not the candidate’s behavior. That’s exactly how it was in my case. I worked at startups, and most of them shut down in their first year.

Not Quite Therapy

  • What do you think your friends would say about you?
  • What about your personality makes you doubt yourself?
  • How do you handle situations when things don’t go as planned?

These questions seem like an attempt to assess maturity and self-awareness. In practice, they shift the conversation into personal reflection under observation. The candidate doesn’t have time to think it through or ask for context. They came to talk about work — and suddenly they’re expected to quickly explain their own reactions and motives. Without a prepared answer, they start guessing what kind of response is expected. That forces them to improvise. In the end, the interview ends up measuring not how well they’d do the job, but how well they hold up under pressure like this.

The Culture Fit Game

  • Why do you believe you’re a good fit for this role?
  • How do you think your experience could benefit our team?
  • Why do you want to work with us specifically?
  • Which of our company values resonate with you?

These questions assume the candidate made a deliberate choice and took the time to learn about the company. In reality, many people apply to dozens of roles at once and only start learning the details after they get an interview. Their understanding of internal processes and values is limited, so their answers tend to reflect not a real connection with the company, but an attempt to express motivation with too little information. As a result, the answers come out generic and don’t say much about how the person actually works.

The Last Job Focus

  • What kind of tasks did you handle in your last role?
  • What challenges did you face on that project?
  • Why did you leave that company?
  • What was your role in the team at the time?

These questions are reasonable on their own, but interviews often end up focusing almost entirely on the candidate’s most recent project. That project might have been short, irrelevant to the role, based on a different level of responsibility, or simply untypical in terms of tasks. As a result, the conversation revolves around a fragment that says little about the candidate’s broader experience. The person may have led a larger team before, worked on a different scale, or operated in a different environment — but that gets lost if all attention goes to the last job.

I’ve often tried to zoom out and explain that what matters is the full arc of experience, not just the latest entry. But the conversation kept circling back to that one last project, as if it had to explain everything. This focus skews the outcome. If the last project is an outlier — the easiest one, the least successful, or simply the odd one out — then the answers reflect a random moment in someone’s career. It’s easier to talk about, but it says very little about the actual experience.

At the end of the interview, it comes down to a simple question: did you understand the person — and did they understand you?