A lot of these are outright stolen from Edward O'Campo-Gooding's list of questions. I really like his list.
I'm having some trouble paring this down to a manageable list of questions -- I realistically want to know all of these things before starting to work at a company, but it's a lot to ask all at once. My current game plan is to pick 6 before an interview and ask those.
I'd love comments and suggestions about any of these.
I've found questions like "do you have smart people? Can I learn a lot at your company?" to be basically totally useless -- everybody will say "yeah, definitely!" and it's hard to learn anything from them. So I'm trying to make all of these questions pretty concrete -- if a team doesn't have an issue tracker, they don't have an issue tracker.
I'm also mostly not asking about principles, but the way things are -- not "do you think code review is important?", but "Does all code get reviewed?".
Some things I haven't found a good way to ask about
- Who decides what features get built?
- Who are the people at your company with a lot of depth of experience? Will I be able to talk to them?
- What do you use for version control? (if nothing, the interview should be over =))
- What kind of testing do you do?
- How do you make sure that all code is understood by more than one person?
- Do you do code review? Does all code get reviewed?
- Do you have an issue tracker?
- Describe your deployment process -- how do you find bugs in your team's code? What recourse do you have when you find a serious bug in production code?
- Who is responsible for doing deployment? How often do you deploy?
- How do you think about code correctness?
- When something goes wrong, how do you handle it? Are there consequences for breaking the build?
- How/when do developers talk to non-developers? Is it easy to talk to the people who are will be using your product?
- Can I see some code the team I'm interviewing for has written? (from an open-source project you work on, for example)
- How do your engineers keep their skills sharp? Does the company pay for conferences/seminars/books/etc?
- How much vacation do people get? If there's "unlimited" vacation, how much vacation do people normally take?
- Is it possible to take sabbaticals or unpaid vacation?
- How many women work for you? What's your process for making sure you have diversity in other ways?
- How many hours do people work in an average week? In your busiest weeks?
- What time do people normally leave work?
- Would I need to be on call? How often?
- How often are there emergencies or times when people have to work extra hours?
- Does your company support continuing education? (will they pay for employees to do a master's degree?)
- What is your turnover rate like? How many devs were hired last year and how many left?
- Do people work on the weekend?
As many of these as possible are "statistical" questions -- a company may say that they "don't have hours", but if everyone leaves at 9pm that's not a good sign.
- Do you contribute to open source projects? Which projects? Which teams work on open source?
- Do your employees speak at conferences about your work?
- Do you offer paid time off to contribute effort to charitable causes?
- How do you determine if someone is a poor fit for your company?
- How are your teams structured? What is the management structure like?
- How often do you pair? What's pairing like? How often do inexperienced people work directly with experienced people?
- What's the onboarding process like?
- Is there any sort of institutionalized way of dealing with plateauing or preventing burnout? (Expecting to hear about rotation of duties or location, sabbaticals.)
- Is it easy to move to other divisions or offices?
- How does internal communication work? This one is super important and I need to remember to ask it more.
- Are there catered suppers? (possibly bad)
- How many hours a week does senior management work? Do they put in 80-hour weeks?
- Are remote work places or flexible hours encouraged or discouraged?
- Are you profitable?
- if not, how does this affect what you can do?
- How do you make money? (I often explain to my parents or non-technical friends companies' business models to test if they really make sense.)
- How much are you planning to hire in the next year?
- Are company financials, minus salaries, transparent throughout the company?
- Are salaries & emails transparent throughout the company? https://stripe.com/blog/email-transparency http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-including-our-transparent-formula-and-all-individual-salaries/ (I consider these very good signs)
- How is the office space physically organized?
- Kitchens and bathrooms offer a great view into how much a company really cares about employees.
Interviewing is hard! Ultimately I really just want to know
- do people treat each other well?
- do you work reasonable hours?
- do you care about the work that you do, and keep trying to do it better?
- do you only hire excellent human beings?