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by bespoke_engnr 2966 days ago
1. What are the biggest challenges you're dealing with on the technical side right now? - is this going to be technically interesting? - something you can learn from? - are they doing super boring things or using super crappy tech?

2. Where do you see the $(team you're interviewing for) in 2 years? - do they respect the team or are they looked at as an annoying expense? - do they talk about training opportunities, growth, etc?

3. What is your favorite aspect of working here? - If it's a stock bullshit answer, I dig more. - If they duck it, that's a smell. - If they answer honestly, then that's a really valuable datapoint.

4. Every company is carrying some amount of technical debt -- what's the tech debt situation here? - how much they think there is - what they're doing about it

5. How would you describe the culture and if/how it is maintained?

5a. Is there an active mentoring strategy? What does that look like?

I made a video about this a while back with a few more questions, and some people left useful comments on it with their own experiences/additions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9XPTay-x8g

2 comments

what bespoke_engnr said, and also

1) If you could change one thing about this place by waving a magic wand, what would it be? (ties in with above but more open ended)

2) Who do you see as your competition?

3) What do you hope to gain by hiring somebody?

4) Why isn't this role being filled from within the company?

These are really rock solid questions. I would also add something about the business side. I like to ask some variation of "who pays". Are they making money off of contracts, implementations, investors, grants, etc. This segues into questions about the motivations of the owners. Are they trying to grow and then sell? IPO? Are they happy to run a small company indefinitely? Do they have to answer to venture capitalists? Shareholders? The state? etc.