I recently chose a new team to work on at Box, and I wrote down some of the questions I asked the teams as I interviewed them to make my decision.
- What are things that need doing that no one is doing? Things you’re doing that you wish you weren’t?
- How do your Tech Lead and Eng Manager split responsibilities?(Especially useful to compare answers given by people on the team who are the TL/EM vs. those who aren't)
- What’s the tech stack? (Have them whiteboard the layers out and ask questions until you understand it enough to re-explain it.)
- Who are the people that add pressure to the team? In what ways do they add pressure?
- How is status reported and tracked?
- What’s your career growth plan? When do you anticipate you’ll be promoted? (Don't forget to also ask this of people who would be above you in the management chain.)
- How far ahead do you know what you’ll be working on?
- What’s a recent technical discussion you were part of? (Ask enough questions to fully understand it and be able to restate the resolution to an outsider.)
As always, the most value comes from followup questions, but these were good starters.
Let me know if you find these useful, and feel free to add your own in the comments.
Top comments (7)
I am going to have to borrow some of these questions for when I'm interviewed. I especially love the first one. What are people thinking about and wishing they could change.
Questions I ask:
And one that I have definitely stolen from elsewhere:
Oh, and I forgot my favourite question:
Have you looked at what the take home test you require does for the diversity of your candidates?
Most interviewers don't have an answer for this, or try to deflect and say it has no effect, without having anything to back up the claim.
Now I've never issued a take home test, so don't have any data to look at, but I would be interested to hear from people who have looked at how take home tests change their applicant pool.
I like your restriction to one skill. I think I'll add that to my set of questions the next time I'm interviewed. I'll start with that one and then ask the question again without the constraint.
I think one of the most important factors when joining a team is human fit with team members. As we spend more than 8 hours together almost every day, we need to feel comfortable having the team members around. Before joining a team, would be a good idea to have a “trial” period of several days working in the team to get the feeling on human fit.
Thanks for chiming in Nguyen Kim Son! Do you have recommendations for how to implement such trial periods? What are some of the tradeoffs and considerations, in your opinion?
I think this period could be “informal” at first: the person participates in other team meeting, even takes small tickets if they want. The “official” period starts when the person decides to fully join the team and last for several days. Normally the person should know at this point if they like the team (and vice versa) so this period is more of a confirmation.
Some questions that gave me good insights during my recent interviews: