As I currently am looking for a company to work with, I took some time to think about some questions to ask in an interview to gain some insight about the company, its culture and how it works.

This list is by no means exhaustive, I mainly use it as a starting point for discussions.

General

What kind of equipment will I be provided? Do I get to choose it?

What’s the longest tenure of a developer at this company? The shortest?

Are developers allowed to go to conferences? Do you pay for it?

Management

Will I have 1:1’s with my manager? How often?

How do you define success and growth for your developers?

How do you like to track tasks?

Code-related

How long do you expect it would take me to deploy my first change? To become productive? To understand the code base?

How long does it take to do a complete deployment?

What’s your policy regarding tests?

Do developers get to “explore” solutions, technologies build prototypes? Do they get a defined fraction of time to do so?

How often do you have major outages? What constitutes a major outage for you?

How do you balance shipping new features and maintaining the code base?

How often do developers work in pairs?

Who is on call?

Culture