Questions To Ask During An Interview As a Developer

This is 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 you should not either. Life is too short.

This was, at the beginning, an aside to this article, on my blog. It grew as the time went by.

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. Most of the time, I focus more on the business / people / culture / processes. To me, it's where things can go eerie quickly.

Position

• If you hire me, what would be my immediate responsibilities?

People

Company Culture

• How would you describe the company culture?
• How do you know if a developer is productive and valuable for the company?
• What's the balance between firefighting and project work?
• Do you think that soft skills (like communication, time management, or being able to adapt) are more important than technical skills?
• What do you do avoid developer turnover?
• Do you think diversity matters in your teams?
• How do you do to have diversity in your team?

Control & Micro Management

• Is every developer allowed to deploy in production?
• How to you understand code ownership?
• Is there any performance review?

Training

• Do you allocate resources for employee training?

Feedback

• Do you have any established feedback process (1-to-1) between managers and developers?
  • Between the developers themselves?
  • Between the teams?

Technologies

• What's the tech stack of your codebase?
• What do you use on the infrastructure level?
• Why do you use <insert-the-technology-they use>?
• Can developers choose their development environments (OS, computer, IDE)?

Business

• Why are you hiring?
• What the vision of the company?
• How will the company looks like in 5 years?
• Do you try to reach a precise target market?
• How do you get feedback from you users?
• What are the biggest challenges your business is facing?
• Is there domain experts who can explain some aspect of the business to the developers?

Teams

• How many developer teams do you have?
• How may developers do you have in each team?
• Do you have product managers? Product owners?
• Are the developer teams autonomous?
• Do you have cross-functional teams?
• Are developers usually working alone on their projects?
• How developers share knowledge in the team?

Processes

Agile

• Do you use SCRUM? Can you describe the process?
• Do you use Kanban?
• What do you think about pair programming? Is it a common practice in the company?
• What do you think about code review? Is it a common practice in the company?

Tests

• Are you writing unit tests / functional tests / integration tests ... ?
• What do you think about TDD? Is it a common practice in the company?

Documentation

• What is good documentation for you?
• Are the codebases well documented?
• Are the functionalities in the applications you're building well documented?

CI / CD

• Do you have a CI pipeline?
• Do you do Continuous Deployment (CD)?
• How often do you deploy in production?
• What do you prefer: small tickets you directly deploy in production when they're done, or bigger tickets?

Requirements

• Who is writing the requirements for new functionalities?
• Do you have kickup meetings with domain experts, managers, and developers, when you want to add a new functionality?
• Is it possible, for developers, to change the requirements?

Quality

• Are you aware of your application's MTTR (Mean Time to Restore), the time you need in average to fix problems in production?
• Do you have a QA team?
• Does the QA team test manually, or do they run automated tests?
• Do you have agile ceremonies, like daily stand up?

Working Place

• Do you allow home office?
• Do you allow remote work?
• Do you work in an open office?
• Are developers isolated or everybody in the same offices?
• Can I visit the offices?

Schedule

• Are the work hours flexible?

Deadlines

• Who decides the of deadlines? How?
• Are estimations considered as hard deadlines?
• Is it possible to change the scope of the tasks if it's clear that the deadlines are too short?
• Do you think a "healthy" amount of pressure on developers is necessary for them to do their best work?

Legacy Systems and Complexity

• Do you consider part of your codebase as legacy? Why?
• Do you have some practices or processes to avoid technical debt?
• Do the management knows the cost of complexity in the codebase?
• How do you reduce the entropy in your codebase?

Holidays

• How many days of holidays do we have?
• Is it possible to have unpaid sabbatical? (months)

Trial Day

• Can I do a payed trial day to know better each other?

To ask to the IT team If Trial Day

• Would you refer this company to a friend?
• What would you change in this company?
• What the most interesting things you've worked on here?
• Are deployments stressful? Why, in your opinion?
• Why do you stay in this company?

Sources

• Reverse interview
• Many others I forgot