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:office: List of questions I might ask during an interview for a software developer job
https://github.com/phantas0s/questions-job-interview

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:office: List of questions I might ask during an interview for a software developer job

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# Questions To Ask During An Interview As a Developer



These are the questions I might ask during an interview, depending on the information I already have, the company, and everything else. I won't ask every single question, and neither should you. Life is too short.



This was, at the beginning, an aside to [this article](https://thevaluable.dev/find-best-software-developer-job/), on my blog. It grew as the time went by.



Some questions don't necessarily reveal what I want to hear, and it's on purpose. If you want to know my stand on things, you can still read my [blog](https://thevaluable.dev/). Most of the time, I focus more on the business / people / culture / processes. To me, it's where things can go eerie quickly.



## Position



* If you hire me, what would be my immediate responsibilities?



## People



### Company Culture



* How would you describe the company culture?

* How do you know if a developer is productive and valuable for the company?

* What's the balance between firefighting and project work?

* Do you think that soft skills (like communication, time management, or being able to adapt) are more important than technical skills?

* What do you do avoid developer turnover?

* Do you think diversity matters in your teams?

* How do you ensure diversity in your team?



### Control & Micro Management



* Is every developer allowed to deploy in production?

* How do you understand code ownership?

* Are there any performance reviews?



### Training 



* Do you allocate resources for employee training?



### Feedback



* Do you have any established feedback process (1-to-1) between managers and developers? 

    * Between the developers themselves? 

    * Between the teams?



## Technologies



* What's the tech stack of your codebase?

* What do you use on the infrastructure level?

* Why do you use ``?

* Can developers choose their development environments (OS, computer, IDE)?



## Business



* Why are you hiring?

* What is the vision of the company?

* How will the company look like in 5 years? 

* Do you focus on a percise target demographic?

* How do you get feedback from you users?

* What are the biggest challenges your business is facing?

* Are there domain experts who can explain some aspect of the business to the developers?



## Teams



* How many developer teams do you have?

* How may developers do you have in each team?

* Do you have product managers? Product owners?

* Are the developer teams autonomous?

* Do you have cross-functional teams?

* Are developers usually working alone on their projects?

* How do developers share knowledge in the team?



## Processes



### Agile



* Do you use SCRUM? Can you describe the process?

* Do you use Kanban? 

* What do you think about pair programming? Is it a common practice in the company?

* What do you think about code review? Is it a common practice in the company?



### Tests 



* Are you writing unit tests / functional tests / integration tests ... ?

* What do you think about TDD? Is it a common practice in the company?



### Documentation



* What does good documentation mean to you? 

* Are the codebases well documented?

* Are the features in the applications you're building well documented?



### CI / CD



* Do you have a CI pipeline?

* Do you do Continuous Deployment (CD)?

* How often do you deploy in production?

* What do you prefer: small tickets you directly deploy in production when they're done, or bigger tickets?



### Requirements



* Who is writing the requirements for new features?

* Do you have kickup meetings with domain experts, managers, and developers, when you want to add a new functionality?

* Is it possible, for developers, to change the requirements? 



## Quality



* Are you aware of your application's MTTR (Mean Time to Restore), the time you need on average to fix problems in production?

* Do you have a QA team?

* Does the QA team test manually, or do they run automated tests?

* Do you have agile ceremonies, like daily stand up?



## Working Place



* Do you allow home office?

* Do you allow remote work?

* Do you work in an open office?

* Are developers isolated or is everybody in the same offices?

* Can I visit the offices?



## Schedule 



* Are the work hours flexible?



## Deadlines



* Who schedules the deadlines? How?

* Are estimations considered as hard deadlines?

* Is it possible to change the scope of the tasks if it's clear that the deadlines are too short?

* Do you think a "healthy" amount of pressure on developers is necessary for them to do their best work?



## Legacy Systems and Complexity



* Do you consider part of your codebase as legacy? Why?

* Do you have some practices or processes to avoid technical debt?

* Does the management know the cost of complexity in the codebase?

* How do you reduce the entropy in your codebase?



## Holidays



* How many days of vacation do we have?

* Is it possible to have unpaid sabbatical? (months)



## Trial Day



* Can I do a payed trial day to get to know each other better?



## To ask to the IT team If Trial Day



* Would you refer this company to a friend?

* What would you change in this company?

* What the most interesting things you've worked on here?

* Are deployments stressful? Why?

* Why do you stay in this company?



# Sources



* [Reverse interview](https://github.com/viraptor/reverse-interview)

* Many others I forgot