And English is a Work in Progress ⌛
You hate interviewing, but companies also hate it as well. The process for finding the right candidate is a time sink, it costs money and employee time to locate and interview potential candidates. On top of that, new employees have to be trained and will need time before they're making significant contributions.
That's why some companies use recruiters, they're supposed to filter out "qualified candidates" for companies to make it easier.
As you're going through this, remember - Your first development job will be the toughest one to get. You'll continue to develop your skills and experience and that will make it much easier for you to land jobs in the future.
A lot of these are outright stolen from Edward O'Campo-Gooding's list of questions. I really like his list.
I'm having some trouble paring this down to a manageable list of questions -- I realistically want to know all of these things before starting to work at a company, but it's a lot to ask all at once. My current game plan is to pick 6 before an interview and ask those.
I'd love comments and suggestions about any of these.
I've found questions like "do you have smart people? Can I learn a lot at your company?" to be basically totally useless -- everybody will say "yeah, definitely!" and it's hard to learn anything from them. So I'm trying to make all of these questions pretty concrete -- if a team doesn't have an issue tracker, they don't have an issue tracker.
I'm also mostly not asking about principles, but the way things are -- not "do you think code review is important?", but "Does all code get reviewed?".