Questions to ask the interviewer — the ones that actually tell you something
"Do you have any questions for us?" is graded too, and most people ask something that gets a rehearsed answer. Here's what to ask instead, and how to tell a real answer from a recruiting-brochure one.
"What's the team culture like?" gets the same answer at every company: collaborative, supportive, we work hard and have fun. Not because every company is lying, but because it's a question with no specific answer to give — so the interviewer reaches for the same three adjectives everyone reaches for. Asking it wastes the one part of the interview you fully control.
Why this part is graded at all
Interviewers do read something into the questions you ask, even informally. A candidate who asks nothing signals they didn't think about the role beyond getting through the interview. A candidate whose only question is about vacation days signals what they're actually optimizing for. Neither is a disqualifier on its own, but in a close call between two candidates, this is one of the things that tips it.
Questions that get a real answer instead of a rehearsed one
"What does someone in this role do in their first month that either goes well or goes badly?" Forces a specific example instead of a job-description summary. If the interviewer has to think about it, that's a good sign — it means they're pulling from an actual person's experience, not a script.
"What's the most common reason someone leaves this team?" Direct enough that most interviewers will give you a real, if diplomatic, answer rather than deflecting entirely. The deflection itself is information.
"What would you want this person to have figured out or shipped by the time we talk again in six months?" Gets you the actual bar for success, which is usually different from — and more specific than — anything in the job posting.
"What's something about this job that's harder than it looks from the outside?" A well-run interview loop will have an honest answer ready. A team that can't answer this, or answers with something trivial, either hasn't thought about it or isn't being straight with you.
For a technical role specifically: "What does the review process look like when someone disagrees with feedback on their code?" Tells you more about the actual engineering culture than any question about tech stack or process framework, because it's asking about a moment of friction rather than the steady state.
What to skip
Anything answerable by reading the company's website — it signals you didn't read the website. And anything phrased to show off ("I read that you migrated to microservices in 2024, can you walk me through the architectural decision tree that led to that") usually reads as exactly what it is: a question built to display research rather than to learn something.
One honest note
You don't need five perfect questions. Two real ones, asked with actual curiosity about the answer, do more for you than a longer list recited from a notes app. If the conversation naturally answered your planned questions already, saying so — "you actually covered what I was going to ask about X, but I am curious about Y" — reads as attentive, not underprepared.
Prepair covers the technical side of the interview — role-specific questions, scored answers — not the closing "any questions for us" moment itself. Practice the technical half first so it's not competing for prep time with the two questions above, which take five minutes to write down and are easy to forget under pressure.