Reverse Interview Questions

Whenever considering a new role, it's worth doing a reverse interview to see if you're a good fit for the role.

Specifically, I've used the following questions in reverse interviews to assess whether a role is a good fit for me:

PTO

Can you tell me more about PTO at your company?
I see Ramp has unlimited PTO, how much PTO do people at your company typically take?
Do people check in when they're on vacation? Is it common for someone to still respond on Slack when they're on vacation?

Do you use cloud based development environments?
Are all developers allowed to have local admin access of their computers?
Is it possible to run your backend locally?
What is the deployment process like at your company like?
Does your team use a service-oriented architecture? If so, are teams responsible for multiple services or just 1?
Does the company provide hardware and what's the refresh schedule?
Do you do continous deployment?
What happens after an incident? Is there a culture of blameless post-mortems?
Do you use a dynamic language? How do you handle the challenges that come with that if you do?
How do you do QA at your company?

How many hours do people work in an average week? In your busiest weeks?
How many hours a week do you find you typically work?
What did your typical workweek look like last month?
What time do people normally leave work?
How often do oncall shifts occur?
How often are there emergencies or times when people have to work extra hours?
What is your turnover rate like? How many devs were hired last year and how many left?
What are the expected/core work hours?

What is the most interesting thing you've learned at your company?
Is there anything you'd recommend reading before I start to understand your domain (ex. Bits About Money)?

How many engineers does your company currently have? How many will the company have by the end of 2024?
Why is your company expanding?
What got you to work at your company initially?
What keeps you at your company?

Is there a conference/travel budget and what are the rules to use it?
What is the promotion process? How are requirements / expectations communicated?
What is the performance review process like?
Where do you see the company in the next 5/10 years?
What does it mean to be successful here, and how do you measure success?
What is the job of a manager at your company?
Let's say I think a particular tool would be helpful for my job, your company willing to cover that? What is the process for getting a tool like that look like?

How do you determine your roadmap for the quarter?
How are ad hoc requests for work filed?
Do you have a product manager?
How do you balance maintenance work with feature work?
What is the goal of your team?
- How do you measure your progress against your goal?
Can you tell me about the projects that you're likely to work on in 2024?
How long do projects take to ship at your company? Let's measure it from inception to deployment
What are the last three projects you've shipped?
Is there any FE code in your team's ownership? Do you have a designer?
If you have a product manager, how do you balance product requests with engineering requests?
How do you determine your roadmap for the quarter?
When a team has an issue with code your team maintains, how do they get help from you?
How is the work organised and assigned amongst the team?
How does intra/inter-team communication typically work?
Do you use any tools for project organization? What is your experience with them?
How do you determine your deadlines?
What happens if a project misses its timeline?
What are some ongoing challenges the team is experiencing that you are yet to resolve?

Can you give me an example of someone who’s been in a technical role at your company for a long time, and how their responsibilities and role have changed?
How are technical decisions made and communicated? Imagine you've made some change that affects everyone at your company, how do you distribute that information to everyone at your company?
How are decisions made? Is architecture dictated top down? Are ideas from anyone welcomed? If so, in what scope/context?
Can you tell me about a time when you’ve had to let someone go?
How does internal communication work? Do folks tend to distribute information via DMs, are Slack channels used consistently?

What are the last three projects you've shipped?
What is the project you're most proud of working on at your company?
What is the biggest struggle you've had at your company?
Tell me about the team. How would you describe the team dynamic?
Has anyone left the team? If so, what was the reason?
How long has the longest team member of yours been at your company?
How do you monitor progress on a project? Do you use JIRA?
Is there a standardized development environment?
At Faire, platform teams usually had some vision document that would describe what our infrastructure would support and be capable of over some long time horizon (ex. 2025)
How well-documented is your code?
What separates a good day from a bad day for you?
- How often do you have bad days?

Can you show me a non-trivial code review?
If I accept the offer, would it be possible for me to meet the team before my start date in February (perhaps sometime in January)?

As a mid-level engineer, what am I expected to accomplish in the first month? What about the first 3 months?
Assuming I joined, what advice would you give to be successful?
What are things you've seen new joiners struggle with?