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Questions to ask during an interview (self.experienced_devs)

submitted 1 year ago by buxton to c/experienced_devs

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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.

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[–] CodeBlooded 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Genuinely curious to see what questions you found to be too detailed and causing you to wonder if you’d want to hire that person. I had a lot of questions in my comment here and I’d love your feedback on them as a company owner!

(Thanks in advance!)

[–] drdnl 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Dont want to call anyone out, because most of the questions are good. It's the sheer quantity, I counted between 10 and 20 questions. An interview should be fun, don't stress me out please

Although I would say that one list is far too focused on financials, you're a dev, not an investor. Some other lists make me want to ask, 'who hurt you?'

Maybe it's because we're a small company focused on hard problems with unknown solutions with a bunch of intelligent and flexible, fast thinking people. We do all the various buzzwords, microservices, clusters, resilience, automated testing trophies, reproducible dev envs, machine vision, machine learning, various p=np problems, etc.

But if the lists are too detailed and rigid I might wonder if you're better off at a more standard company tackling standard problems in a standardized manner. If this comes of as derogatory. The reverse can also be said, that we're a bunch of incompetent cowboys. It's a style thing as well :) (slow is smooth, smooth is fast is a principle I like. We follow all the useful best practices when it comes to cicd, testing and code. I do not have the time for rework)

I enjoy not knowing what I'm doing, if you don't enjoy the cutting edge (and falling of said edge once in a while) you're not going to to enjoy working here :)

Edit: about your list in particular, they're good questions, just try to ask them conversationally instead of slapping a sheet on paper on the table and rattling them off. Except for the macOS thing. We're a Linux shop, noob ;)

[–] CodeBlooded 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Except for the macOS thing. We're a Linux shop, noob ;)

Ha! I’d be fine working on a Linux machine! It’s that *nix terminal I’m addicted to. I just love the MacOS trackpad “gestures” and Homebrew has been a pleasure. Everything I deploy is to Docker/Linux environments anyway. I just really don’t want to develop on Windows if I don’t have to.

Thanks for the feedback! 🫡

[–] drdnl 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tbh, these days WSL2 might be slightly better than macOS at being Linux. As it is Linux (in a very transparent vm) instead of posix or *nix

But for most dev work all three are good options. I've noticed that once you start deploying against stuff like kubernetes or, less so, doing docker stuff you run into limitations on Mac and wsl2. Just random weirdness, especially with new the m1 chips and say cockroachdb. At that point there's no substitute for the real thing :)

[–] CodeBlooded 2 points 1 year ago

You can have my MacBook Pro when you pry it from my cold dead hands!