└── README.md /README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Questions To Ask During An Interview As a Developer 2 | 3 | These are the questions I might ask during an interview, depending on the information I already have, the company, and everything else. I won't ask every single question, and neither should you. Life is too short. 4 | 5 | This was, at the beginning, an aside to [this article](https://thevaluable.dev/find-best-software-developer-job/), on my blog. It grew as the time went by. 6 | 7 | Some questions don't necessarily reveal what I want to hear, and it's on purpose. If you want to know my stand on things, you can still read my [blog](https://thevaluable.dev/). Most of the time, I focus more on the business / people / culture / processes. To me, it's where things can go eerie quickly. 8 | 9 | ## Position 10 | 11 | * If you hire me, what would be my immediate responsibilities? 12 | 13 | ## People 14 | 15 | ### Company Culture 16 | 17 | * How would you describe the company culture? 18 | * How do you know if a developer is productive and valuable for the company? 19 | * What's the balance between firefighting and project work? 20 | * Do you think that soft skills (like communication, time management, or being able to adapt) are more important than technical skills? 21 | * What do you do avoid developer turnover? 22 | * Do you think diversity matters in your teams? 23 | * How do you ensure diversity in your team? 24 | 25 | ### Control & Micro Management 26 | 27 | * Is every developer allowed to deploy in production? 28 | * How do you understand code ownership? 29 | * Are there any performance reviews? 30 | 31 | ### Training 32 | 33 | * Do you allocate resources for employee training? 34 | 35 | ### Feedback 36 | 37 | * Do you have any established feedback process (1-to-1) between managers and developers? 38 | * Between the developers themselves? 39 | * Between the teams? 40 | 41 | ## Technologies 42 | 43 | * What's the tech stack of your codebase? 44 | * What do you use on the infrastructure level? 45 | * Why do you use ``? 46 | * Can developers choose their development environments (OS, computer, IDE)? 47 | 48 | ## Business 49 | 50 | * Why are you hiring? 51 | * What is the vision of the company? 52 | * How will the company look like in 5 years? 53 | * Do you focus on a percise target demographic? 54 | * How do you get feedback from you users? 55 | * What are the biggest challenges your business is facing? 56 | * Are there domain experts who can explain some aspect of the business to the developers? 57 | 58 | ## Teams 59 | 60 | * How many developer teams do you have? 61 | * How may developers do you have in each team? 62 | * Do you have product managers? Product owners? 63 | * Are the developer teams autonomous? 64 | * Do you have cross-functional teams? 65 | * Are developers usually working alone on their projects? 66 | * How do developers share knowledge in the team? 67 | 68 | ## Processes 69 | 70 | ### Agile 71 | 72 | * Do you use SCRUM? Can you describe the process? 73 | * Do you use Kanban? 74 | * What do you think about pair programming? Is it a common practice in the company? 75 | * What do you think about code review? Is it a common practice in the company? 76 | 77 | ### Tests 78 | 79 | * Are you writing unit tests / functional tests / integration tests ... ? 80 | * What do you think about TDD? Is it a common practice in the company? 81 | 82 | ### Documentation 83 | 84 | * What does good documentation mean to you? 85 | * Are the codebases well documented? 86 | * Are the features in the applications you're building well documented? 87 | 88 | ### CI / CD 89 | 90 | * Do you have a CI pipeline? 91 | * Do you do Continuous Deployment (CD)? 92 | * How often do you deploy in production? 93 | * What do you prefer: small tickets you directly deploy in production when they're done, or bigger tickets? 94 | 95 | ### Requirements 96 | 97 | * Who is writing the requirements for new features? 98 | * Do you have kickup meetings with domain experts, managers, and developers, when you want to add a new functionality? 99 | * Is it possible, for developers, to change the requirements? 100 | 101 | ## Quality 102 | 103 | * Are you aware of your application's MTTR (Mean Time to Restore), the time you need on average to fix problems in production? 104 | * Do you have a QA team? 105 | * Does the QA team test manually, or do they run automated tests? 106 | * Do you have agile ceremonies, like daily stand up? 107 | 108 | ## Working Place 109 | 110 | * Do you allow home office? 111 | * Do you allow remote work? 112 | * Do you work in an open office? 113 | * Are developers isolated or is everybody in the same offices? 114 | * Can I visit the offices? 115 | 116 | ## Schedule 117 | 118 | * Are the work hours flexible? 119 | 120 | ## Deadlines 121 | 122 | * Who schedules the deadlines? How? 123 | * Are estimations considered as hard deadlines? 124 | * Is it possible to change the scope of the tasks if it's clear that the deadlines are too short? 125 | * Do you think a "healthy" amount of pressure on developers is necessary for them to do their best work? 126 | 127 | ## Legacy Systems and Complexity 128 | 129 | * Do you consider part of your codebase as legacy? Why? 130 | * Do you have some practices or processes to avoid technical debt? 131 | * Does the management know the cost of complexity in the codebase? 132 | * How do you reduce the entropy in your codebase? 133 | 134 | ## Holidays 135 | 136 | * How many days of vacation do we have? 137 | * Is it possible to have unpaid sabbatical? (months) 138 | 139 | ## Trial Day 140 | 141 | * Can I do a payed trial day to get to know each other better? 142 | 143 | ## To ask to the IT team If Trial Day 144 | 145 | * Would you refer this company to a friend? 146 | * What would you change in this company? 147 | * What the most interesting things you've worked on here? 148 | * Are deployments stressful? Why? 149 | * Why do you stay in this company? 150 | 151 | # Sources 152 | 153 | * [Reverse interview](https://github.com/viraptor/reverse-interview) 154 | * Many others I forgot 155 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------