I was wondering if anyone else had any questions they always asked the interviewer in the “we’ll give you five minutes at the end to ask us questions” bit in interviews.

Personally I always ask what the staff turnover rate is. Mainly because in my first dev job I was one of four people who started on the same day. One of the other guys left after two days, I left after six weeks, and another guy left after two months.

Another I’ll be asking after my current job is if they have a mainframe. I’ve now worked at three companies with mainframes and they all were old corporations where they were outsourcing loads of stuff to unhelpful companies (often IBM) which generally meant lots of headaches.

  • ElanorEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    First thing to figure out is if the new ship is stable:

    • How were the customer numbers doing last 6 months? Churn vs new customers? Finance numbers (if possible to share)?
    • How do you see the product of the company on the market? Who are the main competitors and how will the product win? Warning flags: not increasing customer base, people interviewing for dev roles have no clue about the product’s situation on the market

    Next thing is to understand the team’s position within the company:

    • what were the key deliveries of the team last 3 months, how are they connected to the success of the company
    • what is the next top priority for the team Teams that are working on the key elements in the main product of the company are better for promotion for example. Teams that are working on side-projects or internal tooling could be better WLB.

    Last, but not least, how does the team work:

    • how is on-call? When was the last production incident and how was it handled?
    • how does an idea get into development and to the users? Ask as an open ended question and listen carefully: – is there a backlog and prioritization, or ad-hoc pushing in new tasks – do they mention having different environments, code review, git or similar? – do they mention updating tests, test automation or manual QA? How are releases done? – where do they stop in the description of the process? Do they mention monitoring or logging? Smoke testing or post-launch checks? Is there someone checking if the release was a success for customers (usage/uptake or other key metrics)?
    • how often do they release? Lead time for changes?
    • how do they handle technical debt?