- On-call?
- Team structure?
- When was last crunch time?
- What sets your company/org/team apart from its peers in industry?
- What’s your favorite part of the job?
- What’s something you have worked on or are currently working on that excites you?
- Average number of hours you work? Any after-hours/weekends?
- Typical required office hours? Are they flexible?
- Communication/cooperation w/ international teams (if any); any late nights or early mornings as result?
- How is inter-office/team mobility? Can engineers request transfers or choose to work from a given office temporarily; how easy is it to do so, and is this something that engineers tend to do? Is this something that is encouraged by the company?
- What needs are your team currently attempting to fulfill with its current hiring efforts?
- How autonomous/pressured do you feel in your work?
- What kind of equipment and working environment are devs provided with? What is and is not expensable? Are devs free to customize, or are environments more standardized?
- What’s your stack?
- What’s your policy/practice regarding adoption of new technologies?
- How does your team ensure/maintain product quality?
- What’s your build process like?
- What will I be expected to accomplish in the first N months?
- How does your team respond to outages – both immediately, and afterwards?
This question can help you to determine if a team “assigns blame” to individuals for outages, or takes a blameless, general post-mortem approach.
These are questions both relating to management style – both at the line/org level – as well as more targeted questions intended to be asked to HMs.
- How does the team approach planning? Are ICs consulted and given direct input into OKRs and priorities, or are they decided effectively “for them” by management?
- How do you measure engineer growth, and how does growth factor into promotion and my responsibilities as an IC?
- How do you measure employee/engineer success?
- How is success measured for a manager, team lead, etc.?
- Has anybody left the team in the past year? If so, why?
- How does $company/$team do performance reviews?
- Is peer review factored in?
- Is review very simply between manager/report?
- Who would you consider your company and org’s most respected and
influential leaders? This can be independent of level, seniority, or even
org.
- What makes them so influential?
- How does their work influence your management style?
- Are there any engineering leaders – either within or without the company – that you respect? Why? How does their work influence yours?
- How are new managers in $company/$org brought on? Say a new team is being formed, e.g. being spun off from a pre-existing, maybe more general team to focus on a more specific issue. How does $company/$org select a manager for this new team?
- What sort of training is involved in somebody becoming a manager at $company/$org?
- What do you consider the core pillars of a “good” manager? (“Good” here being intentionally vague)
- Say a direct report came to you confessing to, say, difficulty focusing,
stress, detachment from work, lack of motivation, etc.
- Has this ever happened to you? How did you respond?
- Otherwise, can you walk me through your thought process in addressing this report’s concerns?
- What is, to you, the most important factor in this context?
- Can you talk about how you addressed management during the COVID-19 pandemic
in the United States?
- Gets into the questions of team morale + health
- Good way to shed light on how the team/company treats its employees during times of needed support etc.
- Vacation/PTO policy
- “How many days have you personally taken off in the past year?”
- Good way to get a candid, objective response. If the HM tells it to you straight, then you have a good signal into a) exactly what “unlimited” really means and b) your HM’s encouraged level of candor. And an HM being unwilling to discuss such details with you openly is also worth taking note of.
- “How many days have you personally taken off in the past year?”
- WFH?
- Bonus structure
- Promotion schedule, if any
- What proportion of your hires are experienced vs. new grads? What’s the median and average years of experience that developers have?
- How diverse is your team, organization, etc.?
- “If it’s not diverse or less diverse than you’d like, why do you think that is?”
- How diverse is engineering leadership? How engaged are they in the organization’s DEI efforts?
- What direct initiatives is your organization working on, if any, to prioritize or improve diversity?
- What opportunities are there for me as an IC to contribute to improving diversity and inclusion within engineering at Company?
- To a manager: What initiatives are you a part of w.r.t. DEI?
- Are you happy with your own degree of involvement? If so, why? If not, what do you see as blockers to your increased involvement?
- A common criticism/complaint of DEI efforts is that these are dismissed as orthogonal to ICs’ immediate professional obligations. Heavy involvement in such efforts can oftentimes be used against an IC, with feedback in the vein of “you need to be more technical” or “you need to focus on your immediate responsibilities more.” Similarly, heavy involvement can – and oftentimes, does – end up feeling like an unpaid side job on top of said immediate professional obligations. What does the org/company do to mitigate these risks and reward involvement in DEI initiatives?
Some of these questions came from this post in r/cscareerquestions. The majority of these grew out of my own iterative career experiences.
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