Interview Questions
This is a list of great questions to ask at a job interview. This is not my list. It was taken from DevIceMan on Reddit and replicated here for posterity.
Interviewer
Name - (Write it down!)
Your role? Which office do you work at?
Time with company?
Company
Years in existence?
Core Product(s) & Core Software Product(s)? Who uses the software?
Total employees? Total technical staff? Tech-staff breakdown (dev,qa,ops,etc)
Business model? Customers? Clients? Specialties?
Office
Location - Commute, Stuff nearby
Environment - Cleanliness, Comfort, See where Engineers sit, Desk Size / Monitors / Standing desks, Nearby Sales teams, Breakout rooms, Personalization (desk toys or pictures?), spacious vs sardines, kitchen area
Seating - Open office, cubicles, shared office, private? Spacious vs sardines?
Equipment - Monitors? Keyboard/Mouse? Desk? Standing Desk? Anything expensable?
Other - Dress code? Parking cost?
Happiness:
Me - “Tell me, do I want to work here?” “Why?” “Why might I not want to work here?”
Motivation - What do you find motivational about working for [company]?
Trap - “What do you find the most challenging or frustrating working at at [company]?”
Work-Life Balance:
Hours - Average # of hours YOU work? Any after-hours or weekends?
Office Hours - What are typically required office hours? WFH/remote?
Crunch-Time - How often is crunch time? What causes it?
Other - Travel? On-Call? Remote teams (late/early meetings)?
Work
Development Process - Step me through your development process, from a ticket/task, to code on production.
Design, Planning, Coding, Code Reviews, QA, CI, Testing, Deployment, GIT?
Management / Agile style?
Meetings - What meetings? Time in meetings? Estimates? Client/Customer? Scrum meetings? Retrospectives?
Work Examples - Examples of tasks YOU (interviewer) recently worked on, or currently working on?
Needs - What need(s) are you trying to fulfill with your open position(s)?
Daily - What kind of tasks/work should i expect daily? Any non-specialty or non-dev tasks (i.e. SysOps work?)
Tech Stack - FE, BE, Deployment, 3rd party Integrations, Libraries, Languages, Architecture.
Team Breakdown - PM, QA, DevOps, FE, BE, SQL, etc.
Tech Debt - % time for tech-debt, refactoring, readability, automation, or improving the code base.
Experimental - % experimenting with libraries / languages / techniques?
Deadlines & Tasks
Task Source - Who decides what gets worked on? Where do features/tasks come from?
Influence - How much influence do engineers have over features/tasks? % of tasks driven by Engineering team?
Autonomy - How autonomous do you feel in your daily work? Why?
Deadline Source - Who creates deadlines? Where do they come from?
Deadline Pressure - How much deadline pressure is there?
Resources
Software Licenses? - IntelliJ / etc.
Learning Resources?
Provided food/snacks/drinks?
Any office perks?
Professional Development
Motivation - How are engineers supported in their continual professional development?
Resource - Can any professional development resources be expensed, such as books, training materials, classes, or conferences?
Mentorship - Does your company specifically practice mentoring? What does that usually look like?
Events - Internal classes/presentations? Hackathon week?
Flexibility
How strict are times employees are required on site?
Work from home?
Dress code?
Perks
Health Insurance?
Lunches?
Company Activities?
What can be expensed? Learning resources?
Raises? Promotions?
Human Resources
Steps required between now & actual employment - or anything that may prevent employment after an offer? Drug tests, references, security clearance, other paperwork.
Copy of employment contract / Agreements. IP Assignment clause & non-compete.