interview-this.md

Questions To Ask In Interviews

Development Process

• What will be my day to day responsibilities? How much time do you anticipate I would spend on each one?
• What source control do you use? Can you explain why you chose it?
• Are your repos hosted in-house or on a third-party service? GitHub?
• What is your workflow currently, with regards to developers pushing changes. Do you do pull requests, or does everyone just merge to a central repo?
• Are you using a ticket system or is it more play it by ear? Do you use the same system for both bugs and new features?
• Do you have a code review process?
• Does your team encourage the use of SOLID and DRY design principles to avoid cyclomatic complexity?
  • What is your take on object calisthenics?
• What is your team's process for choosing, adding, and removing third-party code libraries?
• Do you have established code style rules?
  • Did you create your own style guide, or are you using a third party's (PEP8, PSRs, Standard JS, etc)
  • Is there an automated linting process to validate your styles?
  • Tabs or spaces? (If relevent)
  • Allman or BSD braces? (If relevent)
  • Semicolons? (If relevent)
• What are your development environments like?
  • Virtual Machines? Local (VirtualBox) or Remote (ESXi)?
  • Does everyone have an identical development environment?
  • Are you using vagrant and/or puppet/chef?
  • How closely do the dev environments mirror your production environment?
• What is your release schedule like?
• Do you maintain separate release and dev branches? (git-flow?)
• Will I be provided with a new laptop?
  • (Note: These are basically more direct versions of the Joel Test "best tools" question.)
  • Windows, Mac or Linux? Do I get a choice?
  • Am I allowed to install anything I want on that laptop?
  • Will it have an SSD and as much ram as can fit?
  • How hard do I have to justify software purchases?
  • How often will I receive hardware upgrades?
• Which comes first, bugs or features? Are detailed requirements for both determined and documented prior to work beginning?
• Single product, or will I be regularly working on different projects?
• How frequently does your company/team start a new project?
• Will I communicate directly with clients on a regular basis, or does this typically happen through an intermediary?
• Do developers make estimates on deliverables, or are due dates normally decided upon ahead of time?
• What can I expect to see in terms of project specifications and/or mock-ups prior to beginning a new project?
• How do you track development time?
• How do you handle change requests?
• Do you have an SLA (Service Level Agreement)?
  • Do you guarantee any of the following? If so, how long?
    • Turn Around Time TAT?
    • Average Speed to Answer (ASA)
    • Time Service Factor (TSF)
  • What is the escalation plan? What are the consequences if the plan is not followed?
  • Do you have on call hours?
    • What is the on-call schedule?
• How satisfied are your engineers with their current toolset? If they had to replace one tool, which would it be and what would they replace it with?

Remote

• Will the company pay for home office equipment such as monitors or furniture?
  • If yes, will that equipment be considered company property?
  • Would I have to return it if/when I leave the company?
• Do you have a team chat setup such as IRC or Jabber? Do your developers actively use it, is it their primary communication channel?
• Do your developers use video chat software such as Skype or Google Hangouts?
• If a portion of the team works in-office, do you have a dedicated computer to be used for video chat with remote employees?
• Will I have to work over a VPN?
• How frequently will I be expected to visit the office?
• Will my visits be reimbursed or covered outright by the company?
• How flexible are my hours? Can I take time off during the day if needed and make up for it in the evenings?

Codebase / Architecture

• How old is your codebase?
• Do you have an automated test suite?
  • What libraries and tools do you use?
  • What sorts of tests do you use? (unit, integration, system, load, ...)
  • What is your testing methodology? (BDD, TDD, Spike & Stabilize, ...)
  • What is your current level of test coverage? Are you happy with it?
• Do you regularly correct technical debt?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how much spaghetti code do you have?
• How well-documented is your codebase?
  • Do you use automated documentation systems like PHPDoc or JSDoc?
  • Do you maintain a wiki?
• Pure CSS, or compiled middleware (LESS, SASS, etc)?
• What browser and operating system versions do you support?
• Does your codebase require a build process, and is it automated?
• Do you have a continuous integration process implemented?
• Do you use MVC or similar code structuring?
• What is your primary backend language, including version?
• Do you host your product yourself (Local, CoLo, VPS) or is it running on a cloud platform such as AWS or Heroku?
• Do you use open source libraries, and are you aware of the licensing on those libraries?
• Do you contribute to open source libraries?

PHP

• Do you use a public framework or is it an in-house environment?
  • When you find a bug in a public framework, do you give it back to the commumnity?
• Do you use PHP-driven HTML templates, or a third-party template engine such as Smarty or Twig?
• Do you use Composer?
• Do you encourage your developers to take the ZCE exam?
• Which version of PHP are you using?
  • What is the update plan for new PHP releases?

JavaScript

• What is your frontend software stack? (jQuery 1 or 2?, Underscore/Lodash?, Angular/Ember/React?, etc)
  • Why did you make those choices?
• Do you use a templating engine, such as EJS, Jade, or Handlebars?
• Coffeescript or other transpiler? (If yes, is it required?)

System & Network Administration / IT Operations

• Do you use a configuration management tool? (Puppet, Chef, cfengine, Ansible)
  • Why was it choosen?
  • Is its use accepted throughout your IT staff?
• Are configurations version controlled?
• What is the process for granting a user access rights (RDP, SSH, etc.) to a system?
• Are there multiple access levels for different classes of user?
• Do developers have admin/root rights on systems?
  • If yes: Why?
• Do you have different staging environments for testing/development? (Like: DEV, QA, PreLIVE, LIVE)
• Are developers allowed to connect to systems outside of the development environment?
• Do you have a Change Management process? (ITIL, etc.)
• How do you organize system administration, application development, application deployment and application operating so they fit together?
• Is there a wiki for server documentation/howtos/best practises?
• Do you use the same OS distribution on all your servers, or is each server configured for specific needs?
  • Why did you choose your OS? What were the requirements?
• Are development systems and services standardized, or do developers choose their own environments?
• Do tools need to be approved before use, or may I use whatever I want?
• How frequently do you replace server hardware?
• Do I have to replace hardware parts myself or is there a dedicated team / external contractor?
• What software / services do you use to load balance?
• Are your applications architectured for horizontal or vertical scaling?
• What is the average uptime of your servers?
  • Do you consider uptime to be a good indicator for system reliability?
• How do you test fault tolerance? Do you have some kind of "Chaos Monkey"?
• Is there a process for self-build packages (.deb/.rpm/.msi) to be put on some internal repository when an official repository can't provide a package/bugfix?
• How do you manage IP addresses and DNS records on your network?
• Do you have plans for (switching to) IPv6?
• Do you categorize your networks? (database server network, frontend network, middleware network?) or is everything mixed together in various networks?
• Are DEV/QA/PreLIVE/LIVE systems all in one big network, or is each on a separate network? Are they firewalled so a DEV system can't DoS a LIVE system?
• What is the process for managing rules on internal/external firewalls?

Monitoring / On-call duty

• Do you have any application-level logging? If so, how are logs accessed?
• Do you use any monitoring software? (Nagios, Icinga, Zabbix, etc.)
• Do you regularly record and review application performance metrics? How are performance optimizations prioritized with respect to other types of tasks?
• How does it inform staff of error conditions? (Email, SMS, big monitors in each teams room, etc.)
• Is there a permanent on-call duty for each IT team?
• Is there a permanent "control center" that keeps track of events and informs the responsible on-call duty?
• Is there an escalation process if someone cannot be reached?
• Do the developers also have an on-call duty?
• Does time working on incidents/problems afterhours, when on on-call duty, count as overtime?
• Are employees expected to be doing after-hours work while waiting on-call?

Developer Coordination

• How is your team structured?
  • How many developers do you currently have?
  • How large are your team groups?
  • Vertical slices or Horizontal?
• Are teams seated together?
• Do teams have isolated areas from the rest of the staff / other teams?
• How frequently do team members find themselves in meetings?
• Do your developers pair program on a regular basis?
• Do you follow an agile methodology for project management (Kanban, scrum, etc)
• Do your developers use screen sharing or collaborative coding tools?

Culture

• What would my role at the company be? Where would I be working within the organization?
• Why are you hiring for this position?
• What is the rhythm to the work around here?
• Is there a time of year that it's all hands on deck and we're pulling all-nighters, or is it pretty consistent throughout the year?
• How about during the week / month? Is it pretty evenly spread throughout the week / month, or are there crunch days?
• What made you (the interviewer) choose to join this company?
  • What do you enjoy the most about working here?
• Who are the heroes at your company? What characteristics do the people who are most celebrated have in common with each other?
• Is there a company reward system for employee accomplishments?
• What type of people are successful here? What type of people are not?
• Am I allowed or expected to take my work home with me?
• What are the expectations with regards to hours worked, deadlines, and overtime?
• How much vacation time do you provide? How much lead time is expected on vacation requests?
• Open office, personal offices or cubicles?
• Is there a dress code?
• What relationship does your dev department have with your sales department? Who sets the deadlines?
• Does the company provide snacks and/or drinks?
• What are your expectations for how many productive hours a developer will have per day?

Company

• What's the biggest change your group has gone through in the last year?
• If I get the job, how do I earn a "gold star" on my performance review?
• What are the key accomplishments you'd like to see in this role over the next year?
• About which competitor are you most worried?
• How does sales / operations / technology / marketing / finance work around here? (I.e., groups other than the one you're looking to work in.)
• What's one thing that's key to this company's success that somebody from outside the company wouldn't know about?
• How did you get your start in this industry? Why do you stay?
• What are your group's best and worst working relationships with other groups in the company?
• What keeps you up at night? What's your biggest worry these days?
• What's the timeline for making a decision on this position? When should I get back in touch with you?
• If we have a very successful year, what would that look like?
• What will have have happened over the next 12 months? How does this position help achieve that?
• What's your (or my future boss') leadership style?
• How does the company / my future boss do performance reviews?
• How do I make the most of the performance review process to ensure that I'm doing the best I can for the company?
• What information is shared with the employees (revenues, costs, operating metrics)?
• Is this an open-book shop, or do you play it closer to the vest?
• How is information shared?
• How do I get access to the information I need to be successful in this job?
• How many non-developer staff members does the company have?
• Who is your healthcare provider?
• What percentage of insurance does your company pay?
• Is your company currently profitable?
• Does your company release open source code?
• What is your company policy with regards to me releasing open source code (personal projects)?
  • If there is an approval process, how lengthy is it?
• What is your company policy with regards to side projects?
  • Am I allowed to work on my own sites?
• Do I own the code I make in my own time on my own hardware?
• Will the company pay for training programs / certifications / conferences?
  • What is the approval process like?