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Please feel free to submit additions! 3 | 4 | ## Company 5 | * Does the company tolerate brilliant jerks? 6 | * Is the company sometimes willing to make culture or engineering tradeoffs in favor of security? 7 | * What is the company's risk management strategy? 8 | * How are decisions made and communicated? 9 | * How are priorities decided between teams? 10 | * Does the company support community engagement, like speaking at conferences or contributing back to open source projects? 11 | * Is the company willing to spend as needed, or is a lot of justification required? 12 | * If there's a set security budget, what is it and what's the budget management process? 13 | 14 | ## Team 15 | * What is the team’s current make up in terms of seniority and expertise? 16 | * Do they seem happy? Is anyone on the team likely to leave? Looking for growth that they can’t get here? Possibly upset by hiring externally for this role? 17 | * What are the major projects you foresee for the security team? 18 | * Is the team likely to grow and require hiring? Any missing skills that you can think of? 19 | * Does the CISO have authority to fire poor performers as a last resort? 20 | * How is security viewed by other teams? 21 | * How would you describe the team's work/life balance? 22 | * What is the ratio of reactive to proactive work? 23 | * Is there an on-call rotation or is everyone on-call all the time? 24 | 25 | ## Role 26 | * Who does the CISO report to? Why? 27 | * What is the envisioned scope of this role? 28 | * Are priorities and incentives aligned between the CISO and upper management? 29 | * If you could focus on the CISO role full-time yourself, what would you do? (Ask the hiring manager.) 30 | * How do you gauge or measure success for this role? 31 | 32 | ## Technical 33 | * How important are firewalls to your security model? (Where are you on the spectrum between a hardend perimeter/soft middle and full zero trust?) 34 | * What is the company’s approach to technical debt? 35 | * What is the cloud strategy, assuming there is one? 36 | * What does the tech stack look like at a high level? (Programming languages, operating systems, open source vs. commercial.) 37 | 38 | ## Tactical 39 | * How are IT support and operational responsibilities handled? 40 | * What’s the travel policy? Do employees fly business class on longer trips? 41 | * Do people get offices or is it an open space environment? 42 | * What’s the vacation policy? 43 | * How close to the office do most people live? 44 | * Is working from home once in a while practical? What about fully remote work? 45 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------