I've never interviewed anyone, but also, if they don't ask me any questions about the company then I'm gonna think they simply don't care and they applied for the role "just for a job".
- Is your job worth caring about? Let's be honest, not everyone is working on putting people on Mars or pushing the boundaries of machine learning, etc. A lot of programming jobs are just spitting out code for a paycheck.
When I was a tad younger, with less experience under my belt, and fewer choices in employers, I interviewed at many a job where I was expected to act like I'm deeply enthusiastic about jobs of little import to anyone and technically amounted to not much more than flailing my arms at a keyboard for 8 hours a day. That expectation is ridiculous.
The mudane, boring jobs need to be done. Hire people who are capable and willing.
This is a job, not a church.
- One thing I've experienced are the grueling full-day interview process that certain companies are a fan of (one such company rhymes with Blamazon). Literally 7-8 hours straight of interviewing, even your lunch hour is yet another interview. I don't think I've ever had intelligent questions by the end of those. The questions I did have were answered by interviewers before you, and at this point I've been thinking about manhole cover sizes, jelly bean estimations, families crossing bridges, and regurgitating CLRS algorithms solutions for so long I can't possibly come up with anything more.
Full-day cycles are grueling, and to expect candidates to be chipper and operating at 100% (or even 80%) is unrealistic.
What I do is write down ahead of time 10ish questions, then ask each one of 2-3 interviewers. That will usually lead to one or two follow up questions, and that's about enough. Yes, all-day interviews are grueling, but with preparation I view the question-asking phase as a break.
I think what happens is different companies (and dev teams, actually) have different personalities. A type A team/company will look for type A programmers. If you end up with a personality match, it doesn't guarantee you the job but it does probably help a ton.
Well, define "care" and "just for a job." My view is that it very rarely happens that a candidate has sufficient information to know whether the job he's applying for is one he can "care" about as more than just a method of obtaining a paycheck. In fact, I submit that such information isn't possible to obtain, outside fringe cases (e.g. knowing people on the inside already), without actually working at a place for a time.
I don't want to work with people who don't care.