questions-for-your-interviewer.md

I bundled these up into groups and wrote some thoughts about why I ask them!

If these helped you, I'd love to hear about it!! I'm on twitter @vcarl_ or send me an email carl.vitullo@gmail.com

Onboarding and the workplace

https://blog.vcarl.com/interview-questions-onboarding-workplace/

• How long will it take to deploy my first change? To become productive? To understand the codebase?
• What kind of equipment will I be provided? Will the company pay/reimburse me if I want something specific?
• How will you know if I’m doing a good job?
• How often do two developers work together on a single task? Three or more developers?
• How many of the developers have been here less than 6 months?
• How many developers have been here 2 years? 4 years?

Development and emergencies

https://blog.vcarl.com/interview-questions-development-emergencies/

• How long does it take to do a complete deployment?
• What is a big pull request, in lines of code or files affected? How long is it open?
• How many repositories would I touch to make routine changes?
• How often do developers have to make simultaneous changes across repositories?
• How often do you have major outages? What constitutes a major outage for you?
• Do you have a defined process for handling an outage?
• Would I be expected to be on-call?
• What does your on-call process look like?

Growth

https://blog.vcarl.com/interview-questions-growth/

• About what fraction of their time are developers given (implicitly or explicitly) the freedom to explore or learn?
• How do you define success and growth for developers?
• How often do you do lunch and learns, or other semi-formal knowledge sharing?
• How often would my manager have 1:1s with me?
• What kinds of topics are usually discussed in 1:1s?
• Do you pay for conferences?

Project management and prioritization

https://blog.vcarl.com/interview-questions-projects-prioritizing/

• How do you balance shipping new features and maintaining the codebase?
• What's the lifecycle of new development, from somebody's idea to deployment?
• How do you track tasks? How are those tasks created?
• Do you do agile/scrum?
• How do you decide what to build?
• Do you have "swimlanes" in your task tracking? What are they called?
• How do you know when something is done?
• What project management software do you use?

Sharing mine as well :)

Strategy

• What is the problem you’re solving?
• How have you come to discover this problem?
• How are you solving the problem? How are you different from existing solutions?
• Who is your ideal customer?
• What are your key metrics?
• What does success look like?
• What are the company’s current priorities and challenges?
• What’s your runway?

Product

• What values do you hold related to product building?
• What is your product development process?
• In your opinion, what makes a great product, great?
• What are examples of products that inspire you and why?
• What does quality/craftsmanship means to you?
• How do you ensure quality within with your product?
• When and how do you make space for polishing during product development?
• How do engineers collaborate with designers?
• Who is the designer I’d be working with?
• How often does each developer commit to trunk/master/main?
• How often do two developers work together on a single task? Three or more developers?
• How often code is released to production?
• Can I see an example of an issue/feature?
• Do you do code reviews? How?

Operations

• How is your team currently structured?
• What is the company culture like?
• How do you guys communicate? Where are decisions made primarily?
• How do you decide on what to work on next?
• How do you know when something is done?
• How often do two developers work together on a single task? Three or more developers?
• Who is talking to customers?
• What is your process for setting goals?
• What is your process for planning?
• What rituals do you practice as a team?

Hiring

• Can you walk me through the hiring process?
• What do you think will make for success in this role?
• If I get hired, how will you know I’ve done a great job a year from now?

Compensation

• What would be my fully diluted percentage (or fully diluted share count)?
• What is the strike price and the investor/preferred price?
• Are you about to go to a new round of financing that might void the current 401A?
• What is the company current valuation?
• What is the FMV?
• What is the post-termination exercise period?
• What is the equity band for this role? Carta Total Comp or Pave
• What is the current 409A? Are you fundraising at the moment? Can you hit the board with an electronic consent before the funding round?
• For what level is the job offer? Senior or mid level?
• Love to understand levels a bit more, what distinguishes a mid-level over a senior-level?
• Can you hit the board with an electronic consent ASAP before the funding round? (Go to your lawyers to get a board consent)