Ask These Questions

A curated, categorized list of questions that you may want to know the answers to before accepting a job offer in the software or IT field.

Engineering practices

• What version control system do you use? Can you explain your branch management strategy?
• Do you test your code? Can you describe your typical testing plan?
• Do you use continuous integration tools?
• Do you employ continuous delivery / deployment strategies?
• Can you explain what your release and deployment processes are like?
• Who is responsible for doing deployment? How often do you deploy?
• How do you make sure that all code is understood by more than one person?
• Do you do code reviews? Does all code get reviewed?
• Do you have an issue / feature tracker? How is priority managed?
• How do you find bugs in your team’s code? What recourse do you have when you find a serious bug in production code?
• Are Clean Code values important to your team? How is that institutionalized?
• When something goes wrong, how do you handle it? Can you tell me about a time when something went wrong?
• How and when do developers talk to non-developers? Is it easy to talk to the people who are or will be using your product?
• Can I see some code the team I’m interviewing for has written?
• Who are the people at your company with a lot of depth of experience? Will I be able to speak with them?
• Who are the newer people at your company? Will I be able to speak with them?
• What’s your approach to technical debt?

Management style

• How does engineering work get assigned? Which development methodology do you practice? Can you explain it?
• 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?
• Do you have a dedicated designer? QA engineer? Technical writer? Development manager?
• How often do you have meetings? Are there any scheduled/standing meetings?
• 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, technical and non technical, 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? How often?

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?
• What’s your process for making sure you have diversity in your workforce?
• How many hours do people work in an average week? In your busiest weeks?
• Is schedule flexibility tolerated or is everyone expected to be on the same schedule?
• What time do people normally get to work? 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 are asked to work extra hours?
• What is your turnover rate like? How many devs were hired last year and how many left? Do you think you could’ve 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? How often? Does anyone do this?
• Does this position require travel? How often?
• What is your biggest pain point of working here?

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? Can you tell me about one of these times?
• Are there any local communities you support?

Career development

• Are employees encouraged to go speak at conferences?
• Do you cover travel to conferences? How many conferences a year do developers typically go to?
• Does your company support continuing education or provide tuition reimbursement?
• In what other ways do you support career development?
• What does the first week/month/90 days look like for a new employee?
• What are some of the challenges you’ve seen new employees struggle with?

Culture

• How do you determine if someone is a poor fit for your company? What does a good fit look like in your mind?
• How are your teams structured? What is the management structure like?
• How often do you pair program? How often do inexperienced people work directly with experienced people?
• What’s the onboarding process like? How long does it typically take?
• Is there any sort of institutionalized way of dealing with plateauing or preventing burnout? Rotation of duties, sabbaticals, etc.
• Is it easy to move to other divisions, teams or offices?
• How does internal communication work?
• Do people often eat meals at the office? Is it ever provided by the company?
• How many hours a week does senior management work?
• Are senior managers accessible to developers?
• How formal is the office environment? Will jeans and a tshirt be acceptable? If not, what is considered acceptable?
• Do you allow remote work? Are you a remote-first company?
• If you allow remote work, how do you support remote workers and make sure distributed teams are effective?
• What are some common qualities of the top performers in at the company?
• What are some of your favorite perks of working at the company?
• What is the turnover like at the company and the team I’d be joining?

Financials, business model and 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? What’s your elevator pitch?
• How much are you planning to hire in the next year?
• Are company financials transparent throughout the company?

Office space, hardware, and tools

• How is the office space physically organized? Is it an open environment? Do developers get offices?
• What type of hardware is provided? How often is it upgraded? Is it a company-wide standard or is it customized for the group/team?
• Are developers allowed to use whichever tools they need for the job? Will the company provide funding for these tools?
• Can I install the software I need myself or does an “IT Department” need to do it? Do I have to fill out a formal request?
• Can I choose my own hardware, OS, and software?
• How often does installed software, firewalls, proxies, etc. get in the way of you doing your best work?
• How formal is the office environment? Will jeans and a tshirt be acceptable? If not, what is considered acceptable?

Other

• Can you tell me about how the entire 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? Why are you still here?
• What’s the single biggest issue or problem facing the team/department/company? What’s currently being done to address it?
• Is this position newly created or a backfill? If backfill, why did last person leave? Would I be able to speak with them about it?