Getting a job that fits us is hard. Therefore, we should do our due diligence and ask some questions before so that we know if the job is good or not.
In this article, we’ll look at some questions we should as interviews in an interview to see if the company we’re interviewing for is a good fit.
What’s the Process for Managing Code?
We should ask this to see how code is managed.
Things that we should definitely hear are things like version control. Ideally, it’s done with Git so that we can have both remote and local repositories.
If there’s no version control, that’s definitely no good. If it’s in some centralized system in some office, then we might want to think twice if we want to work from at least part-time.
It’s also possible that proprietary software is used which probably isn’t ideal.
Having automated pipelines for building and deployment are good. Otherwise, the job is probably going to be miserable if we have to do manual builds and deployments since it’s so risky and error-prone.
The stress level of everyone involved will go through the roof if the code is built and deployed manually.
How Long are Typical Sprints?
That’s more of a preference for us. If we want a more relaxing job, then longer sprints are good.
If we want a fast-paced environment, then shorter ones are better.
In either case, we just have to take a pick and see what we like better.
How Many Developers are on the Team?
Ideally, we want to have smaller teams since big teams have big meetings and more communication overhead.
We don’t want to have too many big and long meetings getting in our way. That’ll make anyone miserable in the long run.
However, larger teams will probably have more people to learn from and share knowledge.
Are There Any Offsite Travel Required?
This is another question for us to gauge our fit for a company.
If we love business travel, then we can go for a job with travel. Otherwise, we pick ones that don’t need to travel to do our job.
Do Developers Have Time to Learn on the Job?
Learning is always important and it’s ideal that we get time to learn on the job.
If they do give us time to learn on the job, then that means they care about our growth. They’re paying money for us to learn on the job.
Otherwise, they probably don’t care about our own growth that much and that may reflect on the company’s willingness to retain employees.
How Much Vacation Days Do We Get?
Vacation days are important. Either we can bring it up in the interview or we can bring it up when the offer is received. Either way, we’ve to know that so we can know how long we can take vacations for and still get paid.
The company should be able to have someone fill in for us so that we can have vacations. This is important since we don’t want to think about work when we’re on vacation.
What Are The Processes for Emergency?
Bad things like bad deploys or corrupting data can happen.
Therefore, we should make sure that the company that we may work for has processes to handle those situations.
We should be able to revert bad deploys quickly. Also, we should have lots of downtimes to fix these kinds of issues.
Also, database backups are very important so that we can recover from the in case there’re any issues with the data.
What Technology is the Company Currently Using?
This question may be something that we want to ask if we have any preferences in the technology we want to use.
Ideally, we learn that from the job description, but we should make sure what portion of the system uses those technologies.
Job descriptions probably don’t have such a detail breakdown on how the technologies are used in their systems, so it’s worth asking this.
Conclusion
An interview is a 2-way street, so we should ask questions that’ll help us gauge our affinity for a job or team so that we can be sure that we’ll actually like working there if we get an offer.
