I've had a lot of jobs and, over the years, I've been refining my list of questions to do my best to ensure that the company I'm interviewing at is a good fit for me. This is an important aspect of interviewing and you should feel free to either use this list verbatim or use just the questions that are relevant to you and your needs. I also listed additional resources at the bottom.
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What are the biggest challenges the person in this position will face?
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Can you describe a typical day or week in the position?
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What would a successful first year in the position look like?
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How will the success of the person in this position be measured?
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How would you describe the culture here?
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How would you describe your management style?
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Thinking to the person who you've seen do this job best, what made their performance so outstanding?
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Are there any reservations you have about my fit for the position that I could address?
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Thinking back to people who have been in this position previously, what differentiated the ones who were good from the ones who were really great?
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How does the engineering culture differ from the overall company culture?
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Can you give me an example of a mistake you've made here, and how it was handled?
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How often do you pair?
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When something goes wrong, how do you handle it? Do devs get shamed for breaking the build?
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How are disagreements solved - both technical disagreements and other kinds?
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What happens when personalities clash?
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How flexible are work hours?
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What tools do you use for remote collaboration?
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How do they work together and ensure good communication and collaboration?
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Can you tell me about what I can expect from the interview process?
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How many hours do people work in an average week? In your busiest weeks?
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How often are there emergencies or times when people have to work extra hours?
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Who sets deadlines and what happens when people fail to meet them?
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Can you walk me through your development process, from a ticket or task to code on production?
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What checks and balances are in place to make sure people don't make big mistakes or repeat mistakes
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What is your build process like?
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How does this team plan projects and create deadline estimates?
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What is the median age that an issue will be open for?
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Who is responsible for doing deployment? How often do you deploy?
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Is there a written roadmap all developers can see? How far into the future does it extend? How closely is it followed?
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How often do you have meetings? Are there any scheduled/standing meetings?
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What’s your approach to technical debt?
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Describe your deployment process – how do you find bugs in your team’s code?
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Do you have a QA team?
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Do you have style guides?
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How does engineering work get assigned?
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How are technical decisions made and communicated?
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Would I need to be on call? How often? What is the SLA? How often do people tend to be paged? How often is it a real emergency?
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What does your stack look like? What languages/tools/etc. do you use?
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What sort of growth is available for senior engineers?
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How does your company support the growth of junior engineers?
- Technical capabilities aside, what soft skills would make someone successful in this role?
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Are there times of the month, quarter, or year when the team is most busy?
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Tell me a little bit about your team onboarding process.
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How is employee performance evaluated?
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Is there a budget for employee education/training/development/etc.?
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Is there support for conference attendance?
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What accomplishment are you most proud of since joining the company?
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What size is the team?
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How many total development teams?
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How much vacation do people get? Sick leave? Are they combined or separate?
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Do people check in when they’re on vacation? How often?
The Cut: Best Questions to Ask in a Job Interview
Julie Pagano's Job Search Retrospective
Julia Evan's Questions I'm Asking In Interviews
Julia Evan's Compensation Questions
Charity's How Can You Tell If The Company You're Interviewing With Is Rotten On The Inside