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Questions to ask during an interview (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by buxton@programming.dev to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev

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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.

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[–] doug_fir@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here are some from a text file I keep around for these purposes:

What has your team been working on recently? What new changes have you shipped in the last six months?
What is the biggest difficulty your team is facing right now?
How long has the team existed and how long have you been managing it?
Is the team all remote? Are you?
How long does it take for code to be deployed after being committed?
How often do team members move teams?
What kinds of (soft or hard) skills do you need most on the team right now?
Do you have a defined onboarding process?
How long does it take for people to get up to speed as new hires? How much would a new hire be doing in six months?
Does the team maintain deployment infrastructure? Production infrastructure? Is there an on-call rotation?
What does your planning cycle look like? Scrum? Kanban? Meetings?
What's one thing you would change or improve on the team if you could snap your fingers?
What would you like to be doing less and more of on your team?
How does the product representative interact with the eng team?
Do you have a career ladder, with levels, and expectations at each of the level defined?
What is your performance review cycle like? 1:1s?

[–] potoo22@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

These are all great. I'll be saving these in a file next to my resumes.