Tactical Questions You Should Ask the Recruiter to Ace Your Phone Interview

Often the recruiter does not have an accurate view of what the interview will contain, or even the needs of the customer. You should ask these questions of your actual interviewer, and change your interaction to reflect the information they're looking for, rather than what you've prepared by talking to the recruiter. This means preparing a broader amount of information and looking at different aspects of both the business, technical, and general work requirements.

>Show me the pile of whatever I'll have to work with.

Some things I ask now since only OSS-friendly companies will link you to their repo:

- Ask how they get new devs set up and what Day 1 looks like.

- Ask how they go from feature to production.

- Ask what their coding standards are like. Many places implicitly inherit from more well-known standards because of the culture around a particular language and they may not mention that specifically -- drop hints and get them talking about it if that's the case.

Generally it's a pile of whatever if there's not much detail with their answers. But I'm probably falling into the same trap of interview-voodoo as hiring managers looking for leetcode scores or whatever.