I was wondering if anyone else had any questions they always asked the interviewer in the “we’ll give you five minutes at the end to ask us questions” bit in interviews.
Personally I always ask what the staff turnover rate is. Mainly because in my first dev job I was one of four people who started on the same day. One of the other guys left after two days, I left after six weeks, and another guy left after two months.
Another I’ll be asking after my current job is if they have a mainframe. I’ve now worked at three companies with mainframes and they all were old corporations where they were outsourcing loads of stuff to unhelpful companies (often IBM) which generally meant lots of headaches.
Technical things:
- What’s the development process like? Scrum, Waterfall, … No clear process would be a red flag.
- Is there source code versioning? Git and maybe Mercurial are acceptable. Only SVN would be a red flag. (At “No” I would probably leave the interview…)
- Is there a CI Pipeline? Automated testing? Unit tests?
General things:
- What would my first few weeks here look like? Is there a special introduction program?
- Is this a new role, or am I replacing someone? If the latter, why did they leave?
You’re the second person to mention no vcs, I’ve never seen a company like this and I was a professional job hopper for ten years (consultant, then freelance dev)
Are there still ‘developers’ out there using an ftp client to develop their php app directly on prod like its 2002? I simply can’t think of a normal, workable project without some kind of vcs
