Interview Questions

01 May 2016 in Quotes

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.