
Ask HN: What's your top 5 questions to ask your prospective new employer? - maephisto
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&#x2F;bad practices, company ethics and so on?
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bespoke_engnr
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9XPTay-x8g)

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gradschool
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?

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bjourne
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.

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esbafb8
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
=)

