My repository of questions I can use during interviews to gauge the viability of a collaboration.

Product

  • Is there a business analytics or data analytics team?
  • How many customers does the product have?
  • How large is the product’s total-addressable-market?
  • What is the overall product architecture?
  • How old is the product?
  • How do stakeholders monitor the viability and health of the product?

Lifecycle

  • How often does the team release their code or deploy to production?
  • How are releases approved?
  • How does the application run in production? Binary? Docker? Natively? Kubernetes?
  • Does the team use a particular cloud provider? What is the monthly cloud spend?
  • How is infrastructure provisioned?
  • Does the team use any CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions or CircleCI?
  • How are projects estimated and planned?
  • How are individual tasks assigned?

Culture

  • How geographically distributed are team members?
  • How are process changes discussed and made?
  • How frequent are stand-ups and how long do they last?
  • Do team members pair on code?
  • How are new dependencies evaluated and discussed?
  • Does the team have a plan for career growth?
  • How large is the team? What is the experience level of the most-junior developer? Most-senior?
  • Does the team have a budget for learning or attending conferences?
  • How much time is afforded for learning new technologies, techniques and remaining current with changes in the field?
  • How often is development hardware renewed?
  • What is the interaction like with Design and Product team members? Marketing and Sales?
  • How often do developers interact with internal and external customers and stakeholders?
  • Does the team have any taboo topics or practices?
  • Does the business require tracking of time spent on particular tasks?
  • Is this a new position or backfill for turnover?

Quality

  • How are code changes reviewed and approved?
  • How are architectural proposals made and discussed?
  • How fast are deprecated features disabled and removed?
  • Does the team have a support escalation process?
  • Does the team conduct on-call rotations?
  • What was the last outage like? How was recovery?
  • Does the team conduct A/B testing?