This is a list of questions which may be interesting to a tech job applicant.
I picked a few that are the things I care about. If you're reading this, I might ask you these questions! Or, I might have found this information about your company somewhere else.
Some of these are to suss out red flags, some are to enforce green flags! The goal is just to know what I'm really getting into.
- How does on-call work? (is it incentivized or mandatory, what's the schedule)
- What are the expected/core work hours?
- What are the tasks I would do on a usual day?
- Are there any specific goals for me?
- What does a typical day/week look like in this role?
- Tell me about who I would be working most closely with.
- What management style does my immediate manager and their manager have? (from micro- to macro-)
- Do you have any concerns about my application? (close)
- Something I wrote was just pushed to production. What are all of the steps that happen before/after that?
- Dig into: CI/CD (infra as code, tests, linters, static analysis), monitoring, metrics
- what does code review look like, branching pattern?
- documentation
- Expand, including where the task/project came from. How are projects organized/prioritized, by whom?
- How much freedom for decision making do individual developers have?
- Who sets the priorities / schedule?
- How similar are local/test environments to production?
- How quickly can you respond to security issues in the code or dependencies?
- How do you manage internal / external artifacts?
- How do you manage dependencies?
- What is the team structure?
- How do you balance technical vs business goals?
- How do you share knowledge?
- How big is each team?
- How does the intra/inter-team communication typically work?
- How are differences of opinions resolved?
- What happens when the team is in danger of missing a release target?
- What kind of meetings happen every week?
- Would there be a regular 1-on-1 with my manager?
- What happens after production incidents?
- (Is there a culture of blameless analysis?) - don't directly ask this, who would say no
- What are some ongoing challenges the team is experiencing that you are yet to resolve?
- Walk me through a typical sprint on this team
- How are services and projects delegated to each team?
- Who do developers tend to learn from?
- What do you like best about working there?
- What do you like least?
- What is the performance review process like?
- What's the promotion process? How are requirements / expectations communicated?
- What does it mean to be successful here, and how do you measure success?
- Is there a separate tech and management career path?
- Where do you see the company in the next 5/10 years?
- Are you profitable?
- If not, how long is your runway?
- How many customers do you have? (average customer tenure?)
- What is the company's growth plan for the next 1 year? 5 years?
- What are the big challenges you see coming up?
- What have you identified as your competitive advantage?
- What's the ratio of remote to office workers?
- Is there a budget for co-working space or internet access?
- How often are office visits expected?
- Do you have a 401k or other retirement plan? If so, does the company match additional plan contributions?
- How does PTO work?
- Are sick time and vacation time separate or do they come from the same pool?
- If unlimited - how much do people typically take?
- What does work-life balance mean here?
- If you have a bonus scheme, then how are bonuses determined?
- What have been the typical bonus percentages over the past few years?
- What's the best and what's the worst aspect of working in this role / team / company?
- What keeps you at the company?
Find more inspiration for questions in:
- The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code by Joel Spolsky
- Questions I'm asking in interviews by Julia Evans
- Curated list of salary negotiation advices by Peter Mekhaeil
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