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.