Ask HN: What's your top 5 questions to ask your prospective new employer?

29 points by maephisto 8 years ago | 5 comments

As a software developer (or generally ) what 5 questions would you ask your prospective employer during the interview stage, in order to test your fit inside that company, good/bad practices, company ethics and so on?

bespoke_engnr 8 years ago |

1. What are the biggest challenges you're dealing with on the technical side right now? - is this going to be technically interesting? - something you can learn from? - are they doing super boring things or using super crappy tech?

2. Where do you see the $(team you're interviewing for) in 2 years? - do they respect the team or are they looked at as an annoying expense? - do they talk about training opportunities, growth, etc?

3. What is your favorite aspect of working here? - If it's a stock bullshit answer, I dig more. - If they duck it, that's a smell. - If they answer honestly, then that's a really valuable datapoint.

4. Every company is carrying some amount of technical debt -- what's the tech debt situation here? - how much they think there is - what they're doing about it

5. How would you describe the culture and if/how it is maintained?

5a. Is there an active mentoring strategy? What does that look like?

I made a video about this a while back with a few more questions, and some people left useful comments on it with their own experiences/additions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9XPTay-x8g

gradschool 8 years ago | |

what bespoke_engnr said, and also

1) If you could change one thing about this place by waving a magic wand, what would it be? (ties in with above but more open ended)

2) Who do you see as your competition?

3) What do you hope to gain by hiring somebody?

4) Why isn't this role being filled from within the company?

IpV8 8 years ago | |

These are really rock solid questions. I would also add something about the business side. I like to ask some variation of "who pays". Are they making money off of contracts, implementations, investors, grants, etc. This segues into questions about the motivations of the owners. Are they trying to grow and then sell? IPO? Are they happy to run a small company indefinitely? Do they have to answer to venture capitalists? Shareholders? The state? etc.

bjourne 8 years ago |

I would and have asked: Given two employees, employee A who works eight hours/day and produces X units of work and employee B who only works four hours/day but produces 2X units of work, which one would you prefer assuming both A and B are paid the same salary?

If they don't answer the question, or answers that they prefer employee A, or claims that the scenario is unrealistic because one developer can't be four times as productive as another, then I will probably not be a good company fit.

esbafb8 8 years ago |

I don't have 5 questions, but I have one that I always, always ask: what's your story? The reason is, you want to dig deeper into the human inside. Don't let them focus the answer on the "shallow" story, but rather on what drives them, why they do what they do, why they started this company, how did they overcome challenges, and so on. Well, now I guess you have about 5 questions =)