this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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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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[–] HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I'd ask why I'm only getting 5 minutes at the end to ask my questions.

[–] CodeBlooded@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Here’s a few from me:

  • How many separate projects are developers working on at any given time? (Because I want to know if they expect developers to be context switching all the time.)

  • Is anyone sitting there with a stop watching checking what time I get into work in the morning? (Because I’m not hourly and don’t expect to be treated as such.)

  • Describe the work-life balance.

  • Are you agile? Not agile? Scrum teams?

  • What might an average day look like for me? Walk me through from when I sign in and log off for the day.

  • How do you perform automated testing here? (if they don’t, I’m concerned)

  • Do you enforce code formatting?

  • How do you deploy your code? (if it’s not a CICD pipeline, I’m concerned)

  • How involved in DevOps are developers? (Will o be expected to work on CICD code? Infrastructure as Code?)

  • What version control system do you use? (Of the answer is nothing, the interview is over. I will not work there. If it’s something other than Git, I’m not excited about it.)

  • Is Docker used here? (Docker makes me very productive, I’m concerned if Docker is a tool I’m not allowed to use.)

  • Are there any other programming languages I’ll be using other than <advertised language for the position here>?

  • Are SOLID principles common practice here? Or rejected as unnecessary? (I love SOLID and think it’s useful much more than not. If SOLID is frowned upon, I probably won’t be happy there.)

  • Can I choose what sort of machine I get to work on? (If I can’t work on MacOS, it could be a deal breaker… I love MacOS for development, sue me! 🤷‍♂️)

[–] learningduck@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

There are places that hire developers, but don't use a version control? I'm so shock at this.

For agile thing. I would ask them to describe how they do agile also. You can have a waterfall that called agile as well. Or Agile that estimate ticket with time instead of complexity.

[–] doug_fir@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

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?