Ask HN: Types of questions to ask team members before accepting role?

In my case the question has often unearthed things about the team culture that may work well for some and not so well for others. One example: a person I had an interview with told me that he wouldn't recommend a candidate to join the team if said candidate e.g. wouldn't get along with the typical "tech bros" team culture, which obviously wasn't something mentioned in the job description. For me that was clearly a no-go, for others this wouldn't be much a problem because the job in general was a very interesting one and very well compensated, too. OTOH, I've also heard non-trivial things in other interviews which were not mentioned in the job description but weren't a show stopper for me.

I also use the questions to learn more about the person and culture: if all people say "there is NOTHING I would change, this is a dream job" there is a very high likelihood that this is an environment where you don't speak openly about ways to improve and where individuals keep their criticism for themselves.

This is a great thread! From my perspective, if a job sucks, it's usually because the projects are managed poorly. Here are some things I ask to try and gauge how projects are run:

1. Do you subscribe to a particular development methodology?

This is basically a warm up question. 99% of the time the answer is agile. If it's a startup, they might say "we're moving towards agile." That's a good answer bc it means that you might have an opportunity to help them make agile not suck so much.

2. How long are your sprints

Two weeks is a good answer in my personal opinion.

3. What kinds of meetings do your dev teams have on a regular basis and how often do you have them?

The bare minimum for agile would be something like daily stand-ups (i.e. "scrum") and sprint planning once before each new sprint. Some shops do retrospectives, which are a complete waste of time in my opinion. There's also grooming, kickoffs, and all kinds of other crap.

4. How long are your stand-ups typically?

I'm looking for 15 minutes. If the answer is an hour they can go fuck themselves.

5. Do PMs write separate stories for front-end and back-end?

This is a biggie. Unless you're all full-stack devs, one story for front-end AND back-end is a pile of shit, especially for the front-end devs. You're going to waste so much time explaining the status of such and such story and who is blocked on what BC there is no way in Jira to say that the front-end part of story FUK-123 is blocked story is blocked by itself.by the back-end part of FUK-123.

6. DO YOU HAVE AN OFFSHORE DEV TEAM?

This is another biggie. I don't think I need to explain the pitfalls here, but if the answer is yes, you're going to want to ask a lot of follow up questions.

Completely disagree. If asking about work/life balance this is a red flag for the company then I definitely do not want to work for them.