Questions for Employers

gistfile1.txt

# Questions for employers

## Position

1. What would my typical day look like?
1. What does success look like for this role? In 1 year? In 3 years?
1. How would you help me grow as a leader? Who would I reach out to for guidance?
1. How much time would I get for investigating, unstructured research, and writing? How is that tracked and valued? Can you tell me about the last time someone did this, what did it look like and how was it valued?
1. Tell me about the last time you recognized an opportunity for growth in a staff member and how you developed it.
1. Where would I work? How flexible are hours and location?
1. Who would I report to? Where are they in the management chain?
1. How much PTO is offered? Are sick time and vacation time separate or do they come from the same pool?
1. How much travel is involved?
1. What's the junior/senior balance of the team? (and are there plans to change it)

## Business / Management

1. What are the immediate pain points and problems you’re trying to solve? What are the pain points and problems you’re trying to solve in 2 years?
1. Tell me about the most outstanding leader you have worked with.
1. How is your org structured and why? 
1. What is your management style?
1. How do you communicate with your team? Do you have regular status reports? How is status shared up and down?
1. Tell me about the last time you were crucially transparent with your staff.
1. How do you handle conflicts in project management?
1. Tell me about a leader failed in the past. How do you handle bad team members?
1. How are you funded? What is the business model? What is your company's growth strategy for the next 1 year? 5 years? What is your staff attrition rate?
1. How healthy is the business? What are your current risks? What are your current advantages? How long is your runway?

## Engineering

1. How do you discover customer needs? How do you get user feedback? How is it communicated back to your teams?
1. How do you manage projects? How are tasks created and assigned? How are deadlines calculated? Who does each stage (design, UI, development, testing, release, support)?
1. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
1. How do you design software? Do you do peer reviews? How do you track those decisions?
1. Tell me about the last time engineering made a significant data driven decision.
1. How do you enforce code quality? How often do you run unit tests? Integration tests? How often do you release to production? What stages does the code go through?
1. How quickly can you setup a new local test environment for the product? (minutes / hours / days)
1. How do you prioritize between bugs and features? How do you track bugs? How do you attribute root causes for bugs?
1. What tools and software do you use?
    - Chat
    - WIKI / KB
    - Email
    - Calendar
    - Remote Access
    - Source Control 
    - Code Review
    - Packaging
    - Deployment
    - Monitoring
    - Tasks / Tickets / Bugs
    - Laptops / BYOD?
    - IDE
1. What does it take to build and deploy a single component of your app? How do you handle dependencies? How do you package the build artifact?
1. How do you handle version control? How are your Repo's structured?
1. Is your infrastructure setup under version control / available as code?
1. How do you monitor your services? Do you instrument code? Are all services monitored the same way? What are your KPIs? How are they reported and tracked?
1. How do you handle on-call? What is your on-call incident rate?
1. How do you prepare for disaster recovery? What happens after production incidents? How do you learn from mistakes?
1. Tell me about your best engineer? What makes them the best?
1. Tell me about your worst engineer? What makes them the worst?

## Culture

1. What is your favorite part of working here?
1. What do you think are the gaps in the company culture?
1. Tell me about the last time your team celebrated together.
1. If you wanted to convince me not to join, what would you tell me about?
1. Tell me about the last major disagreement among your technical leadership. How did it turn out?
1. How many meetings do you have per week? How are the attendees chosen? How is the agenda shared? How are action items tracked?
1. Do all managers have regular one on ones? How do they prepare? What do you talk about in one on ones?
1. How do you support continuing education and professional development?
1. What are some ongoing challenges the team is experiencing that you are yet to resolve?
1. Tell me about your last long week? Why did you have to work longer? How did management handle it? How do you feel about it?
1. What have you done to increase or maintain diversity in your company?
1. How often does the team eat lunch together? Are many of your staff friends outside of work?
1. What Open Source projects do you contribute to?
1. How do you promote learning, innovation, experimentation, and growth? How do you motivate your most creative employees?
1. Tell me about the last time the company took a crazy risk. How did it turn out?