Imagine that you have a job interview coming up for a startup. Unlike interviewing for larger, more prominent companies, the vast majority of startups aren’t very famous, and you’re not likely to know anyone working in that particular company. So how do you figure out if working at this startup will fit into your career goals?

假设你即将要为一家初创公司参加面试。与在大公司面试不同，大多数初创公司并不出名，而你可能也不认识在这家公司工作的人。那么，你该如何判断在这家初创公司工作是否符合你的职业目标呢？

The quick and dirty answer is that it’s very difficult to tell — pretty much any job interview is a highly compressed process that leaves out valuable information you’ll need in order to answer that question. But it turns out that there’s a related question that’s easier to answer, that’s nearly as useful as our first question above.

简单来说，很难准确判断，因为面试过程非常简短，常常遗漏了一些你需要作出判断的重要信息。不过，有另一个相关问题更容易回答，而且几乎和第一个问题一样有用。

The question is this: “how do you disqualify bad companies that won’t help you towards your career goals?”

问题是：“你如何识别并排除那些无法帮助你实现职业目标的不良公司？”

This question is easier to answer because you are much better at identifying specific bad traits that you may then test for. If a company you’re interviewing with fails your set of tests, then you may quickly disqualify that company. Conversely, if a company passes all your tests, this doesn’t mean that the company is good for your career goals — it may or may not be; there may well be negative attributes that you’ve not thought to test for — but at the very least, you’ve vetted a company according to a known set of possible downsides.

这个问题比较容易回答，因为你更擅长识别并检验一些特定的缺点。如果一个面试的公司未能通过你的这些检测标准，你可以迅速将其淘汰。相反，如果公司通过了所有测试，这并不一定意味着这家公司适合你的职业目标——可能适合，也可能不适合，因为还有一些潜在的负面因素是你未曾考虑到的。但至少你已经根据一套已知的可能缺点对公司进行了筛选。

Regardless of whether you’re testing for positive or negative traits, you’ll need a way for getting information effectively out of your interviewers. This is where head-fake questions can help.

无论你是在测试积极特质还是消极特质，你都需要一种有效的方法从面试官那里获得信息。在这种情况下，使用假动作问题可以起到帮助作用。

Head-Fake Questions

假动作问题

A ‘head-fake question’ is my name for a technique that has helped me a ton over the past few years. A few friends have told me that my formulation has been useful to them, and so I thought it would be a good idea to write it down in an essay for future use.

我称为“假动作问题”的一种技巧，在过去几年中对我帮助很大。几位朋友告诉我，他们也觉得我这种方法对他们有用，所以我觉得将其写成文章记录下来供将来参考是个好主意。

In American football, a ‘head fake’ is a technique where a football player turns their head to look in one direction but runs in another direction instead. A head-fake question, then, is a question that purports to ask about one thing, but is in reality asking about something else.

在美式橄榄球中，“头部假动作”是一种技巧，球员把头转向一边看，但实际跑向另一边。类似地，“假动作问题”指的是一个看似问某事，但实际上问的是另一件事情的问题。