questions-for-your-tech-interviewer

Questions grouped by theme that I find interesting to ask to our technical interviewer. These questions cover:

• Personal experience of the interviewer in the company
• Working schedule
• Particular things related to the job position
• Management
• Process
• Technical
• Education and improvement
• Career growth and opportunities
• FINAL QUESTION

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IN THE COMPANY

- Why did you choose to come to this company?

- What do you enjoy most about working here?

- What is the most important/valuable thing you have learnt from working here?

- What is something you wish were different about your job? and about the company?

- What do you think the company can improve at?

- What is the most frustrating part about working here?

- Is there a unique thing about working here that you have not experienced elsewhere?

- What makes you stay here and do not change company?

- How did you become (your current position)?

- How would you see yourself growing at this company in the next few years?

- Was there a time where you messed up and how was it handled?

- What does a typical day look like for you?

WORKING SCHEDULE

- Is overtime expected in this role? And in the company in general? How often do people overstay?

- What is your policy on working from home/remotely?

• How flexible is a work schedule? Is it possible to work on Sunday instead of Friday from time to time? How is it looked upon by management and colleagues?

• Does anyone in the team work on weekends? Willingly/forcibly? Is overtime paid?

JOB POSITION

- What qualities do you look out for when hiring for this role?

- How will look a typical day for me if I start working here?

- What would I work on if I joined this team and who would I work most closely with?

- To whom will the role report and can I meet them?

- How empowered are the developers to take technical decisions?

• What would be the most important problem you would want me to solve if I joined your team?

MANAGEMENT

- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the current team? What is being done to improve upon the weaknesses?

- How do you measure individual performance?

• What does success look like for your team/project?

• What is your team's biggest challenge right now?

• What do you measure? What are your most important product metrics?

• Two senior team members disagree over a technical issue. How do you handle it?How do I compare against other candidates that have interviewed/ applied?

• Can you tell me about a time you resolved an interpersonal conflict?

PROCESS

- What software development methodology do you use, e.g. Agile, Scrum, Kanban? Code review practices? How was it improved in the last year? What would you like to improve in your team

- Who supports project documentation? How often do they update it?

- How do you estimate tasks? Who does the estimation? How do you measure tasks? Who is responsible for big changes?

- How do you know what to work on each day?

• How do you understand if a project/sprint has successfully completed or failed? What performance metrics do you use?

TECHNICAL

- How would you describe your engineering culture?

- How soon code submitted to the repository will be deployed to the production? CI/CD?

• What are the engineering challenges that the company/team is facing?

• What has been the worst technical blunder that has happened in the recent past? How did you guys deal with it? What changes were implemented afterwards to make sure it didn't happen again?

• What is the most costly technical decision made early on that the company is living with now?

• What is the most fulfilling/exciting/technically complex project that you've worked on here so far?

EDUCATION AND IMPROVEMENT

- Does your company provide trainings for engineers (lectures, workshops, etc.)? How often? What was the most recent about? Who conducted it?

- Does your company pay for courses/trainings/workshops/conferences outside of the company? Any terms or requirements?

- Does the company have mentoring policy?

• How many professional books have you read last year? What is your favorite tech book? Why?

CAREER GROWTH AND OPPORTUNITIES

- What are expectations for the position I am considered for?

• What are the perspectives for career development in terms of both skills and position? Are there bonuses? What are they awarded for and how frequent are they?

• Does your company have a job rotation program?

• Does your company run hackathons? Does your company reserve time for experiments (new library, new programming language, etc.)? Does your company have open source projects?

APPENDIX:

I usually say that my professional interest are:

• Apply SOLID principles at design, architecture and implementation level.
• Software Architecture (layered, component, service, ports/adapter architecture, etc...).
• Event Sourcing, CQRS
• Interested in Domain-Driven Development (DDD) and Test-Driven Design (TDD).
• Learn about testing. Different types of tests, mocks, etc...
• Asynchronus code and opimization of it
• Microservices
• Accessible html5
• Learn about methodologies

I am interested too in:

• SEO
• User Interface(UI) and User Experience(UX)

Now that my interview knows my interests, ambition and professional goals:

• Do the company fit my expectations and culture?
• Will I be working with situations related to this ambitions and interests?
• Is this job position going to fullfill my curiousity and professional goals?
• In which way will I learn these tings?