When you are taking part on a job interview for a developer position, it is very difficult to form an accurate picture of what working on that place is going to be like.

Here is a selection of questions I think you should be asking. I am not not to tell you what the right answers that because you and me might not even like the same answers, but I think having them will give you a valuable resource.

Onboarding

• is onboarding documented?
• is installation of dev environment automated?
• is there an onboarding-buddy program?
• how long does it take on average to first commit?
• are there clear/documented 30/60/90 days goals/checkpoints?

CI/CD

• are there tests?
• what is the line/branch coverage?
• how long does the full suite take on a company issued laptop?
• is master branch deployed automatically after a merge with a clean test run?
• how often do you deploy? what is the % of rollbacks?

Support

• is pairing allowed/encouraged/required?
• is training/books/events covered? what is the budget?
• how is the pull request/code review process?
• how and how often is feedback delivered?
• who sets employee's expectations and who evaluates performance? are they the same person?

Career

• what are the average tenure and monthly attrition numbers?
• are there separate technical and managerial career ladders? are levels equivalent?
• what portion of a "staff-engineer and above" meeting is comprised of women or URG members?
• is there internal mobility? across departments? across skillsets? management from/to IC?

What do you think? What are your questions?

You might want to know what I wrote about this some time ago

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