Interview Questions

Questions for job candidates to ask interviewers

How often does the team pair, mob, or swarm?
What is the culture around retrospectives? Can you give an example of an experiment/adjustment that was the result of a recent retrospective?
What does code review look like here?
How do you decide what you're working on next?
What mechanisms are there for sharing knowledge between people?

How long does it take...
- between a fresh checkout to running the application locally?
- to run the unit test suite?
- to run a full regression test?
Technical practices
- What's the unit testing like?
- Do you practice TDD?
- Do you all use the same IDE / text editor? (What do you use?)
Siloes
- How do developers ask questions of customers & users?
- What role do developers have in operations and deployments?
- Is there a distinction between people who write code and people who test?
- How are architectural decisions made?

How do you know what you're working on solves a real problem?
What's the process between "it works on my machine" to running in production?
What is the mechanism for getting feedback from users?
How long from completing some code to getting feedback from people using your software?
When's your next release?
What do you do for feature flagging?

Regarding this team's managers:
- What is the general philosophy on slack time? How does that impact day to day work?
- How do lean principles play out in day to day work?
- How is this team's performance evaluated? How does the team find out?
- What are one-on-one's like?
Regarding the folks who manage this team's managers:
- What is their philosophy on risk, scheduling, estimates, and predictions?
- How is disappointment and/or excitement communicated down to the team?
- How is this team's performance evaluated? How does the team find out?
How does this product make the company money? How does your work impact that?

What's the most challenging part about working there?
What do you like about working there?
Every job has frustrations. What's frustrating here?
Do you have a technical leader who takes time to teach/coach you? What's that like?
What do you do when you disagree with a decision made by someone else that impacts you?

Does anyone work from home from time to time? What's the policy around that? What's the culture around that?
When you're sick, do you keep working through it?
What hours do you & your team normally work? How does that change when things are behind schedule?
When was the last time that everything was "on fire"? How often does that happen?

Written 2019-10