Agree with the sentiment and this is a good idea regardless of skepticism about layoffs, but I think "we're growing the team" is not a solid answer.

This is a company that's potentially going to be giving you a lot of money. You should want to understand what they're hoping to get out of that investment. e.g. what are their short/mid/long-term goals and how does hiring you fit into that? Ideally it's clear to you that they have a lot of work they want to accomplish that seems reasonably aligned to what the business owners would want, and it sounds like something you want to get yourself into.

A great answer would be like "we've been acquiring a lot of customers lately and have been starting to run into performance issues, but we don't have the capacity to both handle that and also work on the feature requests we're receiving." Or "we're looking to expand into a new market which carries some new baseline requirements (e.g. FedRAMP) and need help building that."

Software is an industry where most people stay 2 years at a job. The reason they have the position open is because the previous person quit.

In fact "we're growing the team" in a large company is the one that is a red flag.

S tier interview strategy (I'm not being sarcastic here).

They open the interview by asking why you want this position, at the end in your questions time, you ask why the position is open.

There is no case in which they wouldn't say they're growing the team. It would also be true in all cases

You know that people just lie regardless of the real intent behind hiring right?

That's not how that works... Please stop being delusional

This is a bizarre take, I've always asked questions like this when interviewing, and if a manager doesn't have a good answer I ask for follow up conversations with the team before taking a job.

Has it worked out? No, but usually they were all being lied to by upper management. Can't do much about that.

> Has it worked out? No

It's a bizarre take because you have always done it and it has not worked out. What.

I missed a word in there, which was "has it always worked out", but on the other hand I've also dated a lot of people I didn't marry, and even in my original phrasing I think it would be very odd to not ask or try to suss out this information! If nothing else you'll learn later if people are truthful or not, or worth working with again in the future.

False dichotomy, the same team members could have been there for 24 months

I think we're saying the same thing? Just asking about team size won't reveal the answer. So a different set of probing questions might have to be asked.

Naive to think such a question would get anything other than a plausibly ambiguous lie.