Questions to Ask an Interviewer

Continuing on the theme of sharing resources for job-searching, I want to share my collected list of go-to questions to ask during interviews. Most of these questions have come from someone else. Unfortunately, when starting this list, I did not track sources for attribution. For resources I have tracked down, I have a resources section at the bottom.

My workflow has been that, as a part of preparing for an interview, I will review the list of questions and pull out questions that make sense for the person I am interviewing with and the current stage of the interview I am in.

While my questions are grouped into categories, I found the interview context greatly impacted which questions I chose (e.g., I wouldn't want to ask in-the-weeds technical questions on a phone screen). As such, I have copied some questions into a new list, grouping by stage or interviewer into a new section.

Some additional considerations:

  • Many of these questions are quite standard (i.e., basic). Hopefully, the reasoning behind them makes sense. I have annotated some questions that felt more specifically tied to my goals if I thought it would help. Please reach out if I can do this for other questions.
  • I only end up asking a small fraction of these questions. The primary factor in not getting to ask many questions is that there often isn't that much time for questions. Additionally, I prefer to ask more topical or company-specific questions with the time that I do have. Regardless, having a go-to list is an easy win that helps you avoid looking unprepared and offers a sense of security for the periodic short interviews.
  • While there may be answers I would like to hear for some of these questions, there are so many aspects to deciding where to work that these rarely act as complete blockers. Instead, they offer a bit more clarity into the large picture.

By Category

Culture

  • In general terms, how would you describe the work culture?
  • What kind of traits do people who do well here possess?

  • What’s work-life balance like?

    If you get a vague answer or are catching red flags, the following can push for getting specific:

    • What time do you get in/out?
    • Do you work on the weekends?
  • How do you communicate with team members?
  • How is internal mobility regarded?
  • What does it take to switch teams?
  • Is switching teams encouraged?
  • What motivates you?
  • Is there a budget for educational materials (books, conferences)?

Technology

  • What tech stack are you on?

  • How has the chosen tech stack helped?

    I have specifically been looking for Elixir roles. This question helped get a sense of their feelings for Elixir and whether they are doing Elixir-y things (e.g., are they doing fun stuff with OTP) or have a more basic CRUD/API type of application.

  • Most exciting project you’ve worked on?
  • What are some frustrations you’ve experienced recently?
  • Do you have on-call? What’s being on-call like?
  • Overview of application architecture?
  • What are some pain points the team has felt?
  • How do releases work? What is the process and cadence?

  • What are your thoughts on open source?

    I have mentioned my aspirations to contribute to open source in the past. These questions are to identify whether a company is amenable to supporting an investment in open source.

  • Do you support contributing to libraries used?

  • Do you have open source libraries?

    • Have people tried?
    • Opposition to it?

Process

  • How are dev teams shaped?

  • What does your SDLC look like (meetings, workflows, tools used)?

    • Do teams have the flexibility to experiment?
    • Do different teams work in different ways?
  • Who decides what to build?
  • Do developers get to interact with customers? Subject matter experts?

Management

  • How do you incentive the team?

    • Are there iteration goals and metrics?
    • SLOs/SLAs/KPIs that affect pay?
    • OKRs or goals that impact reviews and pay?
  • Can you share an example of something that didn’t go well? How was this handled? Are they tracking progress? Do they catch issues? Are people supported to try things? Supported in getting back on track? Are there punishments?
  • Accountability for direction? Who’s responsible if a project fails?
  • What’s the mentorship/onboarding process like?
  • What’s on your roadmap for the next 3 months?

  • Who sets the roadmap?

    • Is it top-down or bottom-up?
    • Is it engineer-driven or product-driven?
  • What is the performance review cycle like?
  • What’s the average retention of an employee?
  • How fast do you plan to grow? Is this one of many new hires? How is scaling being handled? Is it possible they are falling into the trap of the mythical peson-month?

  • How do you handle a remote/distributed team?

    I am bought in on remote work since it has been come more widely accepted post-COVID. Since this is still relatively new for many of us, I’m curious how they have approached it.

Overview of the company and market space

  • Info about the market space, competition

    • What does the market look like?
    • What does market size look like?
    • Who are the competitors?

    In addition to understanding the space, this can help give insights into the company’s goals and intentions.

    • What makes the company stand out from the competition?
    • Do you have product-market fit?
    • Are you known in the competitive space?
    • Is this a winner-take-all space (buying each other out)?
  • Who are your target customers? How will this change over the coming years?
  • How do you pitch your product to customers?
  • How do you describe what you do to friends and family? Similar to the above question, but more generally applicable.

Funding

For some of these questions, you can benefit by showing initiative in doing some upfront research. Sites such as Crunchbase can give you funding and competitor information. If you have done the research, find ways to phrase questions that show you've done the research and are curious to learn more. For example, "I see that you had a recent round of funding. Can you tell me more about that? How has that impacted runway? What is the goal for the next round?"

  • How does funding work?

    • V/C?
    • Is the company planning another round of funding?
    • Goals?
    • Is the company’s goal to go public?

  • What is the company’s runway?

Personal Connection

I strive to make my last question one of these. Even if I only have time for one question, I would choose one of these. My intention is to end on a more personal, ligher note, ideally leaving the interviewer with a good feeling about interacting with me.

  • Can you share a highlight of the job/company for you?
  • What do you do for fun? Hobbies?

  • If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing?

    This is a wonderful, generally applicable question (product feedback session, interviews, one-on-ones), stolen from my fantastic former co-worker.

  • What's something interesting you recently learned?
  • What book are you reading? Show are you watching?

By stage or interviewer

As mentioned above, I've found that some questions are better equipped for specific stages of the interview process. I haven't fully fleshed this out, but do have a section for the phone screen and another list of questions specific to the hiring manager.

In writing this post, I realized I may benefit from restructuring how I am tracking my questions. I may be able to leverage tags to group questions in useful ways.

Phone screen

  • Am I interviewing for a specific team? Or for a general position?
  • Why is this position open? Is this a backfill? Is the team expanding or splitting?
  • What is the interview process?
  • How many people have you hired for the company?
  • How long has the last person you hired been at the company? How are they doing?

Questions for the hiring manager

  • How will I fail?

    Have they thought about what this role will be doing? What success looks like?

    I've heard from some folks that a focus on failure and what can go wrong can come off as overly negative. Instead, you may want to ask about success.

  • What does success look like? (In this role? At company?)
  • What will this role be doing in 3 weeks? 3 months? a year?
  • Why is this position open? What are you hoping this role will provide for your team?

Resources

  • People that I've worked with, been interviewed by, or have interviewed
  • https://github.com/readme/guides/technical-interviews

  • https://posthog.com/blog/what-to-ask-in-interviews

    These questions tended to be geared more around early-stage start-ups and product-market fit. I don’t think I added many of them to my go-to list as that was not the type of company I was applying to (and I had some similar questions from other lists). However, I would want to revisit this list when applying to an early-stage company.

Notice something wrong? Please consider proposing an edit or opening an issue.
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