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1 min lesson

Your questions for them

Name the parts in "Your questions for them" and give the practical job of each one.

Step 1 of 2

Your questions are graded. In a flat, talent-dense room, what you choose to ask reveals how you think about the work and a careless question can undo a strong loop. The bar is to ask things only someone who did the homework would think to ask.

Aim your questions at the seam this role lives on: how design and engineering actually meet, where the polish line gets drawn and what the hardest open interaction problem is right now.

Questions that signal a Design Engineer's mind
Collaboration
How do design and engineering actually work together day to day here? Where does a designer hand off and where do you two build side by side?
The polish line
How does the team decide something is done? Who draws the 90-to-100 line and what gets cut when the timeline is tight?
The hard problem
What is the hardest interaction problem the team is wrestling with right now, in agent UIs, inline diffs or Tab prediction?
Ownership shape
Walk me through how a feature goes from idea to shipped to supported. How attached does the original owner stay?
The design system
How mature is the component library and how much of the work is extending primitives versus inventing new ones for novel interactions?

Each question maps to a real part of the role and shows you understand it.

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Full explanation

A question that signals vs one that costs you

A QUESTION THAT SIGNALS vs ONE THAT COSTS YOU

Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.

diagram: compare

Same slot, opposite read - the question you choose is itself graded.