Questions you must ask your future employer

Anton Mitrofanov
Nov 8 · 5 min read

At the end of every interview, the employee is asked whether he/she has any questions. By a rough estimate of my colleagues, 4 of 5 candidates ask about the size of the team, work hours and less often about hardware. Such questions work the first time because after a few months employees worry not about the quality of hardware, but about the team’s mood, the number of meetings and enthusiasm for improving the quality of the codebase.

Disclaimer: the questions below make no sense to ask HR because of a conflict of interest.


About work week

Ask about groomings, daily meetings, and other Agile ceremonies. During the answers pay your attention to the emotions of your interviewer, how he describes, look at the mimics. Do you see enthusiasm or fatigue? Are the answers cheerful or remind you of a school boring book?

Ask yourself as if somebody asks you about your work in a month, would you like to look like that.

About the amount of emergency work

At my last job emergencies were everywhere and happened at least once a week. Emergencies are masters of manipulating your personal time. Every time the perpetrator must work till night because they must find and fix the error. Your future team will make an unpleasant impression if you leave the office when a company pays clients for every hour of an unfixed bug.

About the conference during work time

Although at every company I worked for I was able to attend conferences, I know speakers who can attend only with completion on weekends.Nobody cared that such employees benefit a company in technical PR. Even if you don’t like conferences, the answer will show you the boundaries of your freedom.

As a bonus, you can learn how to prepare a presentation and dive into the community if the company has active speakers.

I was happy when my last company compensated for the trip, tickets, meals and renting the flat. If I were a speaker they would compensate 2000$ as a bonus.

About deadlines

As in the question about emergencies, this topic is an indicator of a team’s burnout. Ask how often you will be strictly required to make a task within n days. Such teams tend to believe in the myth that tests slow down development and that dirty class will be fixed in the next week.

A professional refuses to violate the principles of clean code. Every request to make something faster or try more means you’re suggested to write poor code or go beyond your efficiency. When you agree, you show your readiness to violate your principles and admit to working not in full force until you are asked again “to try more”.

Uncle Bob wrote a book about it

Let’s move on to the next question. If you don’t have time, only ask this one.

About the pros and cons

The question seems obvious and even stupid, but you have no idea how much it helps to make the final impression about future work.

I started with this question when I was interviewed by three developers. They hesitated at first and replied that the downsides of something special, no, everything seems OK.

— What about the pros?

They looked at each other and thought

— Well, MacBooks are given out

— The view is beautiful, the 30th floor after all

That’s saying a lot. None of them remembered the project, hundreds of microservices and a cool development team.

But there is the 30th floor and MacBook, yes.

When a person doesn’t remember bad things, he’s either lying or he doesn’t care. This happens when the cons become something ordinary, like being stuck in traffic .

Since it looks like a burnout, I asked about extra work.

They looked at each other again with a small grin. One jokingly replied that they have extra workdays since 2016. As he said this casually, the other immediately corrected that all overtime is paid well and at the end of the year everyone is paid an annual bonus.

Frequent processing leads to burnout. Interest is lost towards the project and team, and then to programming. Don’t sell your motivation for an extra payment, work weekends and late hours.


At each interview, discuss uncomfortable topics in detail. What was a formality would save months.

I agree with interviewers who reject applicants who have no questions. Questions are like a time machine that carries you into the future. Only the lazy do not want to know whether they will enjoy the work.

I had cases when answers to these and other questions turned into two-hour conversations. They provided a detailed picture and saved months, if not years, of work.

This recipe is not a panacea. The depth of the questions and their number depend highly on the area of the company. In custom development, more time should be given to deadlines, and in the overtime. You will learn some crucial details only months later, but these topics help to find big problems when the outside does not portend trouble.

What questions do you prefer to ask?

For a wonderful illustration, thanks to Sasha Skrastyn.

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