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Reverse interview

Engineering

  1. What tech stack do you use? Are you rolling out new technologies or sunsetting older ones? Do you have any legacy system that you need to maintain?
  2. What is your maturity stage? Finding a direction, feature work, maintenance…
  3. What are the next big engineering challenges you will face?
  4. How are requirements delivered to the engineering teams? How are technical decisions made and communicated?
  5. What level of involvement do engineers have in relation to architecture and system design? How much freedom for decision making do individual developers have? What happens if an engineer identifies areas of improvement?
  6. What is the junior/senior balance of the team?
  7. How do you share knowledge? What kind of documentation do you have and how thorough are you about maintaining it?
  8. Is there a written roadmap all engineers can see? How far in the future does it extend? How closely is it followed?
  9. If I accept the position, what would be the tasks I would do on a usual day?

Practices

  1. Is there a standardized, local development environment that closely mirror production? How quick and easy it is to setup?
  2. In general, how is tech debt handled?
  3. Testing strategy? CI? How is health and performance monitored?
  4. Deployment strategy? CD? Access? What happens if a bug makes it to production?
  5. QA strategy?
  6. How do you feel about clean code?
  7. How do you use source control? Git flow / trunk based development? Github (own account)?
  8. Infrastructure as code?

Management style

  1. What management style does my immediate manager would have? Regular 121?
  2. How are differences of opinions resolved when product and engineering disagree?
  3. Describe your onboarding process?
  4. Do you allow developers to take time for learning or personal development, if it is relevant to the project?
  5. Do you allow or encourage people to move across teams?
  6. What does a typical sprint look like?
  7. What happens when the team miss a release target?
  8. What is your turnover rate like? How many developers were hired last year and how many left?

Quality of life

  1. What is your remote work policy?
  2. Flexible hours, or is everyone expected to be on the same schedule?
  3. Freedom of tools? MacOS/Linux? Administrator access? Possibility to code on the work machine for personal projects?
  4. Medical insurance?
  5. Do you have the budget for books and courses? Coworking space? Internet access?
  6. Would I need to be on call? How often?
  7. PTO? What happens if one day I feel sick? Roll over policy for PTO? Policy on unpaid leave or sabbaticals?
  8. Bonus structure, is it merit based or company wide?
  9. Are there any NDAs, non competes, IP agreements, or other legal documents required for me to sign?