this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
64 points (98.5% liked)

Experienced Devs

3956 readers
1 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
jmk1ng@programming.dev
drewsiferr@programming.dev
64
Questions to ask during an interview (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by buxton@programming.dev to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev
50 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Technical things:

  • What's the development process like? Scrum, Waterfall, ... No clear process would be a red flag.
  • Is there source code versioning? Git and maybe Mercurial are acceptable. Only SVN would be a red flag. (At "No" I would probably leave the interview...)
  • Is there a CI Pipeline? Automated testing? Unit tests?

General things:

  • What would my first few weeks here look like? Is there a special introduction program?
  • Is this a new role, or am I replacing someone? If the latter, why did they leave?
[โ€“] drdnl@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

You're the second person to mention no vcs, I've never seen a company like this and I was a professional job hopper for ten years (consultant, then freelance dev)

Are there still 'developers' out there using an ftp client to develop their php app directly on prod like its 2002? I simply can't think of a normal, workable project without some kind of vcs