As I currently am looking for a company to work with, I took some time to think about some questions to ask in an interview to gain some insight about the company, its culture and how it works.

This list is by no means exhaustive, I mainly use it as a starting point for discussions.

General

• What kind of equipment will I be provided? Do I get to choose it?
• What’s the longest tenure of a developer at this company? The shortest?
• Are developers allowed to go to conferences? Do you pay for it?

Management

• Will I have 1:1’s with my manager? How often?
• How do you define success and growth for your developers?
• How do you like to track tasks?

Code-related

• How long do you expect it would take me to deploy my first change? To become productive? To understand the code base?
• How long does it take to do a complete deployment?
• What’s your policy regarding tests?
• Do developers get to “explore” solutions, technologies build prototypes? Do they get a defined fraction of time to do so?
• How often do you have major outages? What constitutes a major outage for you?
• How do you balance shipping new features and maintaining the code base?
• How often do developers work in pairs?
• Who is on call?

Culture

• Do you have a defined process to handle and communicate outages?
• What’s the lifecycle of new development, from an idea to deployment?
• How do you decide what to build? When is a feature considered “done”?
• Do you have any form of knowledge sharing?
• Is working remotely allowed? Encouraged?
• What’s your favorite thing about the company/your job? You least favorite?