- What do you like best about working there?
- What do you like least?
- How would you describe this company's culture? engineering culture?
- What causes the most conflict among employees here?
- What would you change if you could?
- How has the company changed in the past five years? How do you think it will change in the next five?
- How long has the longest serving team member been there?
- What's the average or median tenure?
- How does the company create psychological safety for employees?
- How often do you have to be available outside of normal business hours?
- Can you give me an example of when a project took a major turn in another direction, and what was the cause of this change?
- What was the team's last achievement recognised by the whole company?
- When was the last time someone on the team was promoted?
- What is the company's growth plan for the next 1 year? 5?
- What are the biggest challenges the company has dealt with so far?
- What are the big challenges you see coming up?
- What changes in the industry are you most excited about?
- Is the company currently profitable?
- What are the long term goals for company success? Stay private? Sale? IPO?
- Who are your top competitors?
- Is it live in prod yet? If not, what's the schedule for going live?
- How often are releases done?
- Who supports it once it's released?
- On-call?
- Pager?
- Email?
- On-call?
- Who are the team's/project's customers? What end-users do you deal with? How do they feel about the product?
- Design process
- Who does the design of the product? Devs, designers, PMs?
- Where do feature & bugfix requests come from?
- How does work get in front of devs?
- How does design/architecture happen? How are conflicts resolved during that process?
- How are decisions made?
- How are they recorded?
- How are changes noted?
- Can you explain the process of "idea to feature retirement" starting with the request from the product owner?
- Would my work be full-stack of just backend?
- How big is the code base?
- When was the last time the team performed a disaster recovery exercise?
- What part of the org is this team part of? Who is my boss's boss?
- What is the attrition rate for the team?
- How does budgeting work with your group? Who controls the budget they get?
- Tech stack
- Programming languages
- Databases
- Other services (message queues, file storage, etc.)
- Monitoring and alerting
- Any other interesting bits
- What's your remote work setup look like? How many people are remote vs not?
- Dev env
- One command setup?
- Run locally or remote?
- Works on Linux?
- Development Tools
- Am I able to use whatever development tools I choose without asking permission?
- Ticket/task/etc tracking
- Development Process
- Pairing?
- Testing
- Release with failing tests?
- Source control
- Branching strategy
- Code reviews
- CI/CD
- Docs
- QA
- Other tools for dev/ops
- Monitoring & alerting
- Distributed tracing
- Deployments (k8s, docker, AWS, etc.)
- Incident handling and post-mortems
- How do you balance technical/business goals?
- What is your level of tech debt?
- Reasonable goals & expectations? how to handle missed deadlines?
- Do you have any sort of technical principles or vision?
- Why is this role open?
- Is this a new role, or am I replacing some who left? If the latter, why did they leave?
- What are biggest priorities for the team right now?
- What's the most important thing I could do in the first few months towards those priorities?
- What’s the biggest challenge for someone stepping into this role?
- What would success in this role look like?
- What qualities do you think are most important for success in this role?
- How many hours of meetings per week?
- What might a typical day for me look like?
- Flexibility in the org to move to new projects over time?
- Core hours? Flex hours? Crunch times?
- Room for advancement?
- Learning opportunities?
- Base salary
- Bonus?
- Past bonus history?
- Equity or RSUs?
- Vesting schedule?
- Refreshers?
- 401k?
- Match?
- Health insurance options?
- Conferences & self-education?
- Costs covered by employer?
- Is is treated as PTO or work time?
- PTO?
- Allowed to go negative on PTO balance?
- How many weeks consecutively are allowed?
- Is sick time separate from vacation?
- Year to year rollover?
- If it's unlimited, how much do people actually take?
- Connectivity/equipment/home office budget?
- At hire?
- Later?
- Does this include more than just a computer, monitor, etc., like furniture?
- What is the employee perf review process?
- For this position specifically, how is performance evaluated?
- Working from Taiwan for several months?
- How is work travel handled? Will it be an issue if I want a somewhat more expensive seat for legroom?
- Contributing to open source?
- IP clauses in contract?
- Am I allowed to have side projects that I own?
- Is there anything else I can do to help with your hiring decision?
- Next steps?
- What level is the job offer?
- What are the requirements for this level vs. the level above it?
- What is the salary band for this level?
- What percentage of the company does the equity represent?
- What is the valuation of the company?
- What is the vesting schedule?
- Is there a 1 year cliff?
- Are there quarterly vesting deadlines I should know about?
- What is the strike price?