└── README.md /README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Developer Interview Questions 2 | 3 | This is a list of questions to help developers get a sense of the the places they're interviewing. Because no one deserves a bad fit. 4 | 5 | ## Scheduling and general office stuff 6 | 7 | * What is your dress code? 8 | * What time do people generally arrive and leave? 9 | * What is the lunch break situation, or what do people tend to do for lunch? Do people eat together? Do they tend to work through lunch? 10 | * Do developers work from home or on a non-synchronized schedule? 11 | * Are there options for working from home, even partially? 12 | * If so, what tools do you use to make sure everyone communicates effectively? Do they work? 13 | * Are there weekly or monthly staff meetings? 14 | * On average, how much time would a developer spend per week in meetings? 15 | * How much paid time off is given? What's the process for getting that approved? 16 | * Can I see [and hear] where I'll be doing my work? 17 | 18 | ## Permissions/do you trust me with equipment and stuff 19 | 20 | * Will I get SSH access to your servers? 21 | * Will I get root/Administrator access to my machine? 22 | 23 | ## General stack questions 24 | 25 | * What front-end and back-end stacks do you run? How do you choose these? 26 | * What percent of work per week that happens within a content management system? Who has access to this CMS aside from developers? 27 | * What percentage of your developers’ time is used to build html emails? 28 | * Can I look at your code stack? 29 | * How long does it take for a dev working in my general skill area to set up a local environment? What is involved with that? Docker, Vagrant, none of the above? 30 | * How often do your developers lose time to maintaining, patching, or updating their local environment? 31 | 32 | ## Product management/process related stuff 33 | 34 | * Is your process client-driven, or user-driven? 35 | * How do you do user research? 36 | * How do you determine what features get pulled into the product? 37 | * How do you approach technical debt? 38 | * What's the relationship between development and UX, or between development and product? 39 | * How often am I coding from comps? Where do these come from? 40 | * What's your company's approach to time tracking? 41 | * What's your company's approach to estimation? 42 | * How does the team’s leadership [or the product’s leadership] deal with unreasonable feature requests? 43 | * How much time do you expect I'll be working on legacy products/projects, versus shipping new ones? 44 | * Let's say I'm in this position for a year. What would it look like for me to be a total success? 45 | * Followup to previous question: What will our development/engineering team/product look like then, given that success? 46 | * Do your engineers/developers get to choose their own toolsets? [For instance, if I want to work in a Docker container rather than running MAMP locally, is that cool?] 47 | * Followup to previous question: Do your developers get to choose their own stacks? If I want to write a thing in React, am I allowed, or do I have to stick to what you're already using? 48 | * Do you care about pixel perfection? How many UI reviews does the code undergo? 49 | * Do you have a code standard? If so, how do you balance adherence to a standard with knowing when to revise it, or ignore it altogether? 50 | * How are performance reviews/salary reviews handled? 51 | * What in my background (or on my resume) do you see as the most beneficial for the team? 52 | * Which departments do you interface with the most? 53 | * Are projects usually by team, or solo? How is team assignment determined? 54 | * What percentage of the time will I be working in/on a CMS? Which one is it? 55 | * What percentage of the time will I be working in/on HTML emails? How are they built/managed? 56 | 57 | ## Growth 58 | 59 | * Do developers have a conference/book/research budget? 60 | * Are there weekly or monthly one-on-ones with technical mentors? 61 | * How do you ensure that people on your tech team continue learning? 62 | * Do you have a 20% time policy? 63 | * What challenges does the department/company face in the next month/six months/year? 64 | 65 | ## Team dynamics 66 | 67 | * Can I meet the developers I’m working with? 68 | * Am I taking a person’s place on the team? Why are they leaving? Where do they fall on the org chart? 69 | * Who do I answer to? 70 | * Do I manage/mentor anyone? 71 | * Does/how does your technical/product/customer/executive leadership work on the product on a regular basis? 72 | * Does/how does your technical/product/customer/executive leadership use the product on a regular basis? 73 | * Is the team growing? What are your needs right now? 74 | * How do you avoid team-wide burnout? 75 | * What’s the churn like? How many people have left in the last year, and why did they leave? 76 | * How diverse are the developers here? How do you address the issue of diversity in the field? 77 | * How important is your technology to the core of your company's mission? 78 | * How much runway does the company have? 79 | * Are you currently fundraising? 80 | * Tell me about the distribution of your clients/users. If you do client work, what percentage of your revenue comes from your biggest client? 81 | 82 | ## Company dynamics 83 | 84 | * What's the ratio of developers to non-developers company-wide? 85 | * How do you make sure the separate teams in the office respect one another’s work? 86 | * Tell me about a project that didn't go well. 87 | * What kinds of things are celebrated with company outings? 88 | * Is childcare an option for these outings? 89 | * Are these outings exclusively at bars? 90 | 91 | 92 | ## General operations 93 | 94 | * Tell me about your deploy schedule. Do you use continous integration? 95 | * Do you practice TDD? 96 | * Pair programming? Code review? Code standards? What do I have to do to get work merged? 97 | * If an aspect of your site/app goes down, like if a mail form stops sending mail, whose job is it to fix that? 98 | * Who hosts your work? Rackspace, aws, heroku, managed something or other? 99 | * Do you use any kind of application-level metrics tracking (graphite, datadog, etc)? If so, who decides what gets measured and what acceptable values of it are? Is there a team responsible for generating a metrics library, or does every team roll their own solution? 100 | * Do any of your devs have pager duty? Do developers get to define their own services' alert thresholds and checks? 101 | * Do any of your devs have to work overnight [eg on a deploy]? If so, does this work get additionally compensated in some way? 102 | * What are the chances that I'm going to get a call after hours for a non-outage-related issue? 103 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------