Questions I'm asking in interviews

In a fit of “open source your interview process”, I tweeted yesterday with the list of questions I’m drawing from when interviewing. A lot of people responded in the gist with amazing suggestions, and I thought I’d consolidate them here so they don’t get lost in my pile of gists.

My basic strategy is to spend 20 minutes before each interview I do and pick some appropriate questions from this list. I’ve tried to categorize them a bit. A lot of these are outright stolen from Edward O’Campo-Gooding’s list of questions, as well as from various people at Hacker School. I’d love suggestions for more!

Special thanks to @bmastenbrook, @marcprecipice, @danluu, @kelseyinnis, @zmagg, @graue, and @ircolle for awesome question suggestions.

Edit: A few more things:

• I don’t ask all of these in first interviews. Use your discretion, and do what you feel comfortable doing.
• Asking a lot of questions shows that you value yourself and that you’re careful when making decisions. It’s a good thing.
• If you have an offer, you can schedule extra conversations if you feel that not all of your questions have been answered.
• It can be worth asking the same question to more than one person.

Engineering practices

• What version control system do you use? (if none, the interview should be over =))
• Do you test your code?
• How do you make sure that all code is understood by more than one person?
• Do you do code review? Does all code get reviewed?
• Do you have an issue tracker?
• Describe your deployment process – how do you find bugs in your team’s code? What recourse do you have when you find a serious bug in production code?
• Who is responsible for doing deployment? How often do you deploy?
• How do you think about code correctness?
• When something goes wrong, how do you handle it? Do devs get shamed for breaking the build?
• How/when do developers talk to non-developers? Is it easy to talk to the people who are will be using your product?
• Can I see some code the team I’m interviewing for has written? (from an open-source project you work on, for example)
• Who are the people at your company with a lot of depth of experience? Will I be able to talk to them?
• What’s your approach to technical debt?

Management style

• How does engineering work get assigned?
• How are technical decisions made and communicated?
• How do you balance support work and feature development?
• Can you give me an example of someone who’s been in a technical role at your company for a long time, and how their responsibilities and role have changed? (I love this question)
• Do you have a dedicated designer? QA? Technical writer? Dev manager?
• How often do you have meetings? Are there any scheduled/standing meetings? Who talks to customers (if appropriate) and how?
• Has there been a situation where someone raised an ethical concern? If so, how was it handled? If not, have there really not been any?
• How are decisions made? Is architecture dictated top down? Are ideas from anyone welcomed? If so, in what scope/context?
• How are disagreements solved - both technical disagreements and other kinds? What happens when personalities clash?
• Can you tell me about a time when you’ve had to let someone go?
• Is there a written roadmap all developers can see? How far into the future does it extend? How closely is it followed?
• How is performance evaluated?

Quality of life

• How much vacation do people get? If there’s “unlimited” vacation, how much vacation do people normally take?
• Is it possible to take sabbaticals or unpaid vacation?
• How many women work for you? What’s your process for making sure you have diversity in other ways?
• How many hours do people work in an average week? In your busiest weeks?
• Is variability tolerated or is everyone expected to be on the same schedule?
• What time do people normally leave work?
• Would I need to be on call? How often?
• How often are there emergencies or times when people have to work extra hours?
• What is your turnover rate like? How many devs were hired last year and how many left?
• What’s your retention rate of women over 1.5 years? Do you think you could have done anything differently to keep people who left?
• Do people work on the weekend?
• Do people check in when they’re on vacation? How often?
• Is it possible to work from home, say, 1 or 2 days a week? Does anyone do this? (can be a nice option to have)
• Does this position require travel? How often?

As many of these as possible are “statistical” questions – a company may say that they “don’t have hours”, but if everyone leaves at 9pm that’s not a good sign.

Community involvement

• Do you contribute to open source projects? Which projects? Which teams work on open source? Do you work mostly in the community or do you have a private fork?
• Do your employees speak at conferences about your work?

Career development

• Are employees encouraged to go speak at conferences?
• Do you cover travel to conferences? How many conferences a year do devs typically go to?
• Does your company support continuing education? (will they pay for employees to do a master’s degree?)
• In what other ways do you support career development?

Culture

• How do you determine if someone is a poor fit for your company?
• How are your teams structured? What is the management structure like?
• How often do you pair? What’s pairing like? How often do inexperienced people work directly with experienced people?
• What’s the onboarding process like?
• Is there any sort of institutionalized way of dealing with plateauing or preventing burnout? (Expecting to hear about rotation of duties or location, sabbaticals.)
• Is it easy to move to other divisions or offices?
• How does internal communication work? This one is super important and I need to remember to ask it more.
• Are there catered suppers? (possibly bad)
• How many hours a week does senior management work? Do they put in 80-hour weeks?

Financials/business model/growth

• Are you profitable?
  • if not, how does this affect what you can do? What’s your planned timeline for becoming profitable?
• How do you make money? (I often explain to my parents or non-technical friends companies’ business models to test if they really make sense.)
• How much are you planning to hire in the next year?
• Are company financials, minus salaries, transparent throughout the company?

Things to look for in real life

• How is the office space physically organized?

Other

• Can you tell me about how the interview process is structured? How many interviews are there?
• How often do you offer above asking? Can I speak with someone who got such an offer?
• What do you wish you had known when you joined this company?
• Why did you choose to join this company?
• What’s the single biggest issue or problem facing the team/department/company?” What’s currently being done to address it?