The startup interview questions that actually matter (most engineers skip these)
Contents
After 2,431 interviews in 2025, we've noticed something: the best candidates ask completely different questions.
Most engineers interviewing at startups still ask generic questions like "What's the culture like?" or "What will I be working on?" These questions get vague answers and don't help you figure out if the company will actually succeed.
In this video, PostHog co-founder James Hawkins shares the exact questions that separate great candidates from average ones—and the red flags that tell you to run.
What you'll learn
- How to evaluate if a startup has product-market fit (without asking directly)
- The "default alive" question that reveals if a company will survive
- Questions that show you're a proactive problem-solver, not just looking for direction
- How to spot if founders view engineering as a cost center
- Red flags in company culture that most people miss
- Why asking about founder motivations matters more than you think
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PostHog is the leading platform for building self-driving products. With a full suite of developer tools – AI observability, product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, error tracking, logs, and more – PostHog captures all the context agents need to diagnose problems, uncover opportunities, and ship fixes. A data warehouse and CDP tie it all together, unifying that context into one source agents can read across. You can steer it all from Slack, the web app, the desktop (PostHog Code), or your own editor via the MCP.