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25 questions every programmer should ask on a job interview

Posted on May 18, 2010 by jondruse

The last few jobs I’ve had proved to be somewhat disappointing. What I realized after a few months was that it was mostly my fault for not asking the right questions.  In a way a job interview is really for both parties. Not only do they have to think that you fit in, but you have to think that you’ll enjoy working there. These 25 questions are what I should have asked. Hopefully they can spur you on to write your own, or you can just take these. Either way it’s important to figure out what you’re looking for in a job or career.

General Questions:

  1. Is there a dress code?
  2. What are the normal business hours?
  3. Who would I report to, and what are his/her hours?
  4. Do you offer benefits?
  5. What is the waiting period for benefits?
  6. What is your policy on working from home?
  7. Wow much vacation/sick time would I get?
  8. What is the average length of employment?
  9. What is a typical day/week like?
  10. What is an atypical day/week like?
  11. What would my workstation be like?
  12. How many people are on the team?

Technical Questions:

  1. What version of ruby/rails are you currently running?
  2. Do you plan to upgrade?
  3. How closely do you follow ruby/rails conventions? (MVC, db schema, etc.)
  4. Do you work as a team?
  5. Does code get reviewed before it can be committed? By Who?
  6. How much test coverage does the project have?
  7. What is your deployment strategy? (shell script, capistrano, CI, etc.)
  8. Do you use git? svn? other?
  9. Do you have a development strategy? What is it?
  10. Do you have a regular release cycle?
  11. What platform would I be developing on? (mac, linux, windows)
  12. Would I be able to bring my own computer?
  13. How to you project the application will progress in 6 months? 1 year, 5 years?

You can obviously swap ruby/rails for whatever you’re working with. The point is that you know what you’re getting yourself into. Remember, just as you are putting your best foot forward, so are they. Not that they are intentionally deceiving you, but they probably won’t naturally offer this information. So it’s up to you to find out.