31–40 of 467 posts
One I am going to start to ask is "Are all developers allowed to have local admin access of their computers?" I've struggled against this in my last 3 positions. This is a dealbreaker for me, and should be for all developers.
For many years I gave a talk titled "Questions Engineers Should Ask" This list is missing the two most important [busines] questions: 1. How do you make money? If you can't understand, or the interview can't explain, then I'd run away. This can also lead to interesting questions about risks, competitors, etc. 2. What's preventing you from making more money? The answer that you want to hear is engineering effort . If…
(Like the siblings comment, I may disagree with "The answer that you want to hear is engineering effort", but the questions are definitely valid in some situations)
Why doesn't the interviewee ever ask the interviewer a whiteboard or puzzle question, "to see how you think?"
Because unless you are some sort of celebrity engineer, "interview is a conversation between both parties" is nonsense. Company is interviewing the candidate not the other way around, no matter what we like to think. Edit: Sorry I should've clarified. I am specially referring to companies that don't really have to care about your feelings towards their interviews. FAANGs for example. They simply don't care and there…
TLDR if you don't think you're interviewing the company too, you're doing yourself a big disservice and selling yourself short.
Why doesn't the interviewee ever ask the interviewer a whiteboard or puzzle question, "to see how you think?"
Because unless you are some sort of celebrity engineer, "interview is a conversation between both parties" is nonsense. Company is interviewing the candidate not the other way around, no matter what we like to think. Edit: Sorry I should've clarified. I am specially referring to companies that don't really have to care about your feelings towards their interviews. FAANGs for example. They simply don't care and there…
I can deal with most tech problems and flawed companies, but the above list are my deal-breakers, and I absolutely am interviewing them to find out the answers.
Why doesn't the interviewee ever ask the interviewer a whiteboard or puzzle question, "to see how you think?"
Because unless you are some sort of celebrity engineer, "interview is a conversation between both parties" is nonsense. Company is interviewing the candidate not the other way around, no matter what we like to think. Edit: Sorry I should've clarified. I am specially referring to companies that don't really have to care about your feelings towards their interviews. FAANGs for example. They simply don't care and there…
If you assume you have no leverage then you will have no leverage, but that's more because you choose not to exercise it than because you couldn't exercise it.
There is a question about funding. So I'll assume the company is a startup at some stage. But I'm surprised there aren't any questions about stock.
For many years I gave a talk titled "Questions Engineers Should Ask" This list is missing the two most important [busines] questions: 1. How do you make money? If you can't understand, or the interview can't explain, then I'd run away. This can also lead to interesting questions about risks, competitors, etc. 2. What's preventing you from making more money? The answer that you want to hear is engineering effort . If…
Working in the profit center of a company is often enviable, but let's not forget that cost centers in large companies can also offer benefits in things like work/life balance.
A better question would be "why do you use [the source control they use]". The answer, if coming from a knowing person, may tell you quite a lot about how the technical decisions are taken in the company.
I'd focus your questions to only the ones where answers might make a difference as to whether you accept the job. Are you really going to turn down a job because their on-boarding process isn't optimal? Or to a bad tech answer... would you turn down the offer, or help them improve from the inside? I do like this list, but filter it down to what you need to respond to an offer. And that filter will be different for ev…
Turn down an interesting offer because of onboarding? Maybe not. Choose between two roughly equivalent companies, because one has a good onboarding process which likely means both investing in growth and caring about documenting things for people who didn't have lots of existing context? Definitely possible.
Like I said, everyone's filter will be different. There are probably valid reasons to ask every question on the list. And also valid reasons to skip every question. We all have different goals and preferences with our careers.
I would change the part: ``` Do you use source control? Do you test code? Do you use bug tracking? Do you use CI/CD? ``` to ``` How do you use source control? How do you test code? How do you perfrom bug tracking? How do you solve CI/CD? ``` For really good companies asking if they test code seems insulting :P
Well that's the general expectation anyway for 'tech companies' to be testing and adopting best practices these days. There are even companies nowadays that are tech enabled with apps, engineering departments, etc and they call themselves 'tech companies', but they don't have any tests, code reviews or a CI and take the shiniest tool for the job.
So if I was interviewed at any company, startup or large corp for a software engineering role and they don't have any of the above, I would gently terminate the interview. Imagine if hardware engineers were to tell us that they don't do verification or tests on components that they ship.