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

• How many teams do you have? How big are they?
• What do you expect from your developers? Following what the managers tell them? Bringing business value, not only coding?
• Do you think that soft skills, like good communication, good time management, and good adaptability is more important than technical skills?
• What do you do to keep your employees?
• Do you think diversity matters?
• Do you allocate resource for employee training?
• Are responsibilities shared among the members of a team?
• Is blaming a usual practice in the company?
• Do you feel there are any skills currently lacking on the team?
• Is every developer allowed to deploy in production?
• Does it happen that a developer work alone on a project?
• How do you share knowledge in the team?
• Do you have any established feedback process (1-to-1) between managers and developers? Between the developers themselves? Between the teams?
• Is there any performance review?
• Do you think a "healthy" amount of pressure on developers is necessary?

Business

• What the vision of the company? Where do you see the company in 5 years?
• Who's your target market?
• Where does the funding come from?
• How do you get feedback from you users?
• What the biggest challenges your business is facing?
• Is there experts in the company who can explain the business to the developers?
• Can developers ask for precisions about the business easily, and have answers?
• Is everybody involved in the team, including the managers and the deciders, can communicate easily?
• Why are you hiring?

Company culture

• How would you describe the company culture?
• How do you define a senior developer?
• How do you know if a developer is productive and valuable for the company?
• What's the balance between firefighting and project work?

Processes

• Do you have product managers? Product owners? Are the IT teams autonomous?
• Do you use SCRUM or Kanban?
• Are you writing unit tests and/or functional tests for your softwares?
• Do you follow TDD?
• Do you do pair programming? In what situation?
• Do you do code review?
• Do you write documentation? Is it up-to-date?
• Do you have a CI pipeline?
• Do you do Continuous Deployment (CD)? Do you deploy often in production?
• Do you prefer having tasks/tickets going on for days or weeks, or do you try to break down tasks/tickets as small as possible?
• Do you know your 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 using automated tests like acceptance tests?
• Do you do some meeting between developers and managers, when introducing a new functionality on your product(s)?
• Is it possible to change the requirements? Is it possible to do it without asking the management?
• Do you have agile ceremonies, like daily stand up?

Working Place

• Is home office allowed? Under what conditions?
• Do you allow remote work? Under what conditions?
• What kind of office do you have? Open offices?
• Is there only developers in one office? Where are the marketing / customer care teams?
• Can I visit the offices?

Schedule

• Are the work hours flexible?

Deadlines

• Who decides the deadlines? How?
• Are estimations considered as hard deadlines?
• Are the deadlines flexible? Can we change the scope if the deadlines are too short?

Technologies

• What's the technical stack used in the company?
• I saw you're using <insert-random-technology-here>. Why?
• Do you enforce the development environment, like OS or IDE?

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