Interviewing requires a lot of time and energy. Maybe you need to study some technical topics ahead of time. You probably already have commitments that require a lot of your focus—like another job or children. That's why it's important to be selective where you can about companies you want to interview with.
Here are the ten questions I'm using to decide whether or not I'm interested in interviewing with a company:
- How large is the engineering team?
- What is the make-up of the engineering team? Such as, how many managers are there, who do they manage, etc.
- How often are one-on-ones?
- Who are the one-on-ones with?
- Is there career coaching?
- Are there performance reviews?
- How have you handled performance reviews with the pandemic?
- What's the development process like? For example, do you work in sprints?
- How tasks are estimated and assigned?
- Are there regular team retrospectives?
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Top comments (41)
Good list Ashlee!
10+ interviewee questions I think are wise to ask:
Who are your customers?
How do you communicate with them?
How do you like working here?
What would you like the company to invest more time in?
What is a typical work day like here?
How do you approach testing?
How do your sprints work?
How do you, as a company/team, make sure you're working on the right things?
What is your tech stack?
What are the biggest concerns about your codebase?
If you were starting over fresh, what technologies would you choose that are different from what you are currently using?
What are your long-term plans?
Excellent questions!
I've used some of these before and they helped me to determine that certain companies weren't a good fit for me. I also asked things like this, relating to the career coach:
How do you promote growth for your employees?
I use this question to figure out if they provide study materials, conference tickets, etc etc.
Who do I talk to if I want to get a book about [programming topic]?
Do they have an interest in your personal and professional growth?
And most recently:
What are your views on remote work?
Great list. A lot of folks are totally lost here.
you can ask these of the initial screener but they probably wont have the answers. After they pass your resume on to the hiring manager and they call you there is no reason not to ask these questions. they will or should ask you if have any questions and that is the opportunity to ask. I think you will impress the interviewer with these questions and they in my experience they will answer as best as possible and their answers will allow you to honestly assess the opportunity for its appropriateness to you
Good question! I never asked about if there are any one on one meetings or performance reviews before. This are good questions to add to my list! Tnx!
Awesome list. I also ask about code quality and how it is maintained etc.
I wish I had thought about this before joining my current project, because knowing what I know now, it may have changed my destination.
Now don't get me wrong I love my current job but the politics at the moment. Our Engineering team is less than 15 people myself included if you had told me that I would have passed on the job, I know what happens in small teams it ends up being a handful of talented people doing the job while others do the bare basics. Due to the fact its a small team it can sometimes get a little heated, when it comes to the feedback. I have found that larger teams of more than 20 people its more sustainable.
Also if I new our development process I would have never joined, what is is that no testing lets keep pushing into production and fix the bugs as we go.... Real makes for fun times, being on the phone to the customer explaining the latest patch broke the system, and they will need to wait a few hours while we debug the system.
Try being on a team building the software calculating loads to go on rockets to and from the International Space Station, without testing. No, seriously. And, of course, they did Friday commits (cuz why not?) The sad thing is, it was the most capable team of devs I've ever worked with; they were just ridiculously overworked and management insisted that new features were always more important than testing.
I joined as a front end lead and, after kicking and screaming each retrospective about testing, finally stepped on toes and created my own team to create our own testing framework. Within a month we were at 90% test coverage.
I got fired and replaced with unpaid interns, but I'll take that any day over killing astronauts or answering to a Congressional investigation over it.
Omg that's wild. I just can't understand the logic of that! How do they sleep at night, really?? Is it a total lack of empathy, inability to think of others, or what.
When it comes to government prime contractors, you'd have about the same level of effectiveness by just setting piles of cash on fire.
How many bugs would you said you guys were able to catch with the introduction of testing with a project like that, which was previously completely untested?
OMFG so many. I knew I was on borrowed time for calling out management, but even some of the other teams were probably gunning for me when they started getting test failures and test coverage alarms on commit (which is stupid, because they had both the authoring app and the test runner on their local). Like, hearing dozens of grumbles of "God damn it" from nearby cubicles each day, for the first week especially. The devs I commandeered to work on it would IM our group "DRINK!" (we made it into a mock drinking game) every time it happened.
I really wish I had the foresight to open source it before giving it to them. I'm sure it was quickly abandoned after I left.
I'll definitely be asking about testing next time I'm job hunting. Once you've lived with automated testing, you don't want to go without!
Great post! Interviews are just as much about asking them questions to see if they are a good fit for you. Also- love the 🤟🏼! I have several family members that are HOH & deaf. :)
These are all good questions to ask at some point during the interview process, but be careful with asking too many questions prior to the first interview. You want to show interest, but don't want to sound like you're questioning the company's practices. Give them a chance to introduce you to what they do, and slowly reveal the truth over several interviews.
But that's the thing. I am questioning the company's practices. I don't want to find out three interviews in that I don't want to work for a company because their practices don't align with my needs. That's a waste of my time and also a waste of theirs. These questions show interest in the things that matter in the long term and if a company is offended by them, that's on them, not me.
I'm sorry, I don't understand why this would be necessary. Do you have an example you can provide me with to understand? I don't see how this approach could be negative.
Asking questions that point out failings of a company (and they all have failings) can be seen as criticism. Criticism from the outside is often viewed negatively, as you don't have the background to understand why the company does things the way they do. To many people this give the impression of arrogance.
It sets the perception of your expectations high early in the process. This may scare of recruiters.
I'm not saying any of these are not relevant questions, but the manner in which they are asked is important.And unfortunately, human nature and defense of one's own failings can cause a negative impression.
Interesting. Thanks for clarifying!
My expectations are very high and there's no problem with that. I don't want to work for a company that can't handle high expectations for a supportive environment. So, if they drop interest after these questions because I asked them "too early", good for us both then. Neither of us would be happy down the line.
That’s absolutely right. I’m not sure if you are sending them via mail? If the company has multiple interviews, I would ask them in a first phone interview or so because then I could also ask again to clarify things.
I did a lot of interviews as an interviewer and I always liked it to get such questions because it shows that the candidate knows what’s important. So if you’re not getting further interviewed because of those questions, it was probably not the right company to work for.
It does matter how you ask a question, for sure. For example, I'd really rather not work for a company with no automated testing ever again. Instead of asking, "You people do automated testing?" you can ask, "Can you tell me about your process to ensure a quality product?" People like talking about how clever their processes are, and if they have a good one, they'll probably be happy to answer, and you'll get useful insights. If the answer is "We're a bunch of geniuses who never make mistakes," I can run screaming.
I also ask
1). I assume Developers are a valuable resource for your organization. How do you show them they are valued? (Do they provide acceptable hardware, or is it from 5 years ago? Do they pay for training or is the 3 month pluralsight that comes with your MSDN it?)
2). When I start a job I want to bring value to the company as quickly as possible. What is your onboarding process like? (Basically will you be paying me to install ssms, or visual Studio? Any decent company should have you hit the ground running)
Hey Ashlee! Thanks for writing this. I am one that has high expectations as well and while I'm not disabled officially I do have certain health issues that make my own list of questions highly relevant to me.
In my opinion, find what's relevant to you, make a list of +/- 10 questions and ask them of the prospective employer. Whether you do that before an interview, in an interview or any other time during the process, just make sure you're going into the situation with eyes wide open. Having relevant questions for employers helps a lot. In my last job search I had people act miffed when I asked questions and I had people eagerly answer them. Both responses say a lot.
For those of you who have to deal with staffing agencies, I can add these questions which should be answered via 2-3 minute email chain before you ever agree to the typical staffing agency recruiter's sales pitch call. Said recruiters often get furious on LinkedIn when I point these things out. Oh, well. They'll live.
If at all possible, they want to make a pitch over the phone and not be held to anything in writing. Keep that in mind as I go down this list, it's why I'm telling you to get this stuff via email. If the agency breaks from anything they've agreed to, you can withdraw consent of their right to represent (which, of course, they'll insist on getting back from you in writing via email). On the rare occasion you need to do that and they threaten you, you've got it in writing and you're free to respond with "sue me."
And then there may be some things they'll ask you or of you, on which you need to stand firm:
Keep in mind that I'm only speaking from the perspective of an American whose formal career began at the start of the Great Recession, and who has seen numerous examples through the years of the insidious practices I detailed above (and plenty more which aren't coming to mind, I'm sure) by staffing agencies.
It seems most folks aren't thinking too far ahead, judging by the average length of employment of 18 months, but here's a good question imo:
What would it take for me to get a promotion to the next level?
This helps clarify both what makes a star contributor at your current level, what the team values in their people, and how your hiring team thinks about promotions. It could also reveal if the company lacks clear definitions for career grading (helllllo, startups!) or, if other engineers interviewing you can't answer this question, it could point to management/communication problems within the org. My $0.02.
These are all valid points, but in my opinion not the most important. All this organizational overhead of one-on-ones, performance reviews etc. is only a percentage of your work time, hopefully far <50%. Frustration from technical difficulties is more important than frustration from these things. So the questions I tend to ask on job interviews are:
Also, I don't share your opinion that going to interviews requires lots of time and energy. I would even recommend going to interviews just for sports, pretending you are interested just to see what questions you get and how well you can do.
No. Don't try to speak for other people and what they find most frustrating about their work environments. You have your own concerns and preferences but they are yours. Don't project them on other people who have different needs.
It's not an opinion. And you should probably pay attention to who writes the posts you comment on. I am Disabled and chronically pained/fatigued. Interviews take an incredible amount of time and energy that I only have so much of.
I'm not disabled, and still agree that interviews require a lot of time and energy (especially when you're already working).
my SO would also have the same struggles of going around to lots of interviews, but in Adam's defense, I didn't see anything in the post re: those needs as being what was driving the list. Maybe there was biographical info missed somewhere? Have a nice day
I added some questions that are specific to software engineer's perspectives and to spot hidden duties that go beyond a software engineers role: dev.to/jankapunkt/questions-to-ask...