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Getting to Know an Employer as a Developer

Motivation

When getting to know a potential future employer, I have never asked the exact same set of questions twice. Many answers are given without an explicit question. Nevertheless, there is a core set of explicit questions that I keep asking to get a better picture of the environment. I will share this core set of questions with you today.

I won't go into much detail about what I ask each question for: for most questions it should be obvious. The overall theme is:

Can I be happy at this place on this team for longer?

There is often too little time to ask all of these questions, so setting priorities and going with the flow of the interview helps. On to the questions!

Questions

Questions to ask to members of HR

  • What event led to hiring for this position?

  • What can you tell me about the people on the team that I would be joining?
    Is it a cross-functional team?
    Are there any external/freelance developers?
    Are there any senior/post-junior/lead/staff/principal/architect developers?

  • Do developers take part in on-call shifts?

  • What are the core hours for work at this company?

  • What's the approach to overtime in this company?

  • How many developers share a room in this company?

  • With regard to hardware, Linux compatibility varies greatly among models and makes a big difference. What is the process of picking what hardware will be ordered for me?

  • I need a truly ergonomic chair. Is that possible?

  • Can I get a test account?
    Can someone give me a quick tour of the software that I'll be working on?

  • What do you like about working as a ... (position) at ... (company name)?

Questions to ask to members of IT

  • (With senior engineer roles and beyond:)
    What are the responsibilities of a ... (position) at ... (company name) in particular?

  • Are you doing agile?
    Who gets to decide: what is built, how it is built, by whom and when?

  • Who is allowed to put new tickets into a running sprint?

  • Can you tell me about the current tech stack and architecture?

  • Does the team work with a monorepo?

  • Does the team practice TDD, BDD or DDD?

  • Is there an Ops team, are developers in charge of deployment and operations?

  • How often do you deploy?

  • How much test coverage do you have?

  • Do you do continuous integration?

  • How do you keep up with technical debt, with security fixes and the latest releases of third party dependencies?

  • What version of ... (key software one) and ... (key software two) are you using?

  • How is code review done within the team?

  • Where in the "Good, fast, cheap" space do you want the team to operate?

  • At work, what opportunities are there to learn something new, to grow as a developer, to grow as a person, to experiment, to have fun?

  • There is a conference called Chaos Communication Congress every year from December 27th to December 30th that means a lot to me. Will I be able to take vacation during that time of the year?

  • What do you like about working as a ... (position) at ... (company name)?

That's about it: these questions should already take quite some time. The more you rush through questions the less you hear the answers.

Surprised by that list? Found it helpful? Do you ask something more that gets you interesting replies? Let me know!

Sebastian

See also?