Questions a Knowledge-Seeking Developer Should Ask at a Software House Job Interview
Most developers asked why they want to change their jobs say something along this line: I want to learn more, I feel like I’m not improving my skills in my current job. For some reason though, when the time comes to ask the hiring manager or recruiter questions, all they ask is:
a) is one allowed to work remotely from time to time?
b) do you have medical?
c) how about paid annual leave?
Either they are really interested in finding a job that lets them work remotely, go on holidays and enjoy private medical care, which frankly is almost every developer job out there these days, or they are asking the wrong questions.
For those of you who are interested in finding a job in which you will become better at what you do, here are some tips on what you should ask to find out whether the particular software house is the right choice for you.
Q1: How do your developers learn?
This is how you find out whether the company cares about skills development and has already taken the steps to facilitate learning.
You might hear any of the following answers:
- They do code review, refactoring sprints, pair programming, dojos, retreats, code roasts…
- They participate in internal/external hackathons
- They allow to experiment with new stuff of their developers’ own choice
- They have knowledge sharing meetings and give internal talks
- They learn from each other (it’s great as long as they have someone at least as experienced as yourself)
- They read books on various topics and talk about them in formal and informal meetings
- They look online for answers to the problems they struggle to solve
If they mention every one of these points or most of them, you hit jackpot. Get ready for a learning highway.
Q2: Do you allow developers to experiment?
Experimenting is one of the best ways to learn so it would be wise to favour employers who allow developers to choose the technology for each project. What’s more, in order to encourage experimenting a company needs to allow you sufficient time and safety to fail. You might want to find out whether you will be working in a hypersonic speed, always chasing a ridiculously short deadline.
If this is the case, you will most likely feel pressured to go for your comfort zone technology and hesitant to use one you’re less familiar with. You may consider it a good sign, if they do reserve time for exploration on their projects. Don’t expect them to come up with a fixed number of hours per week/month, just try to find out, what their approach is. If they admit they usually don’t have enough time to experiment, you could ask if your additional pair of hands would change it.
Q3: What does it take for one to get promoted to a higher position?
Don’t underestimate this topic, as it’s an indication on how fast or slow people gain skills in a company. Surely, skills development rate is an individual thing and largely depends on the developer’s motivation but there are things software houses can do to track your progress and help you advance. These are three things you should expect from the management to do:
- They know and communicate openly what skills they expect from you at different career levels. If you know the conditions you need to meet in order to get promoted, you will find it way easier to work towards next goal. It’s as simple as that. It concerns both hard- and soft-skills.
- They track your progress and provide you with feedback. Another rather obvious, but yet really important point. Find out whether they will set up 1 on 1 meetings with you every few months. This way you are sure to get an insight into your progress and stay on track.
- They use peer review to help them evaluate their developers’ progress. Your fellow developers’ insight into your performance is a way to get useful and highly detailed performance evaluation. A software house where they make the effort to collect it is a place to be.
Q4: Tell me about a time your team did something totally different / innovative
“We are looking for a developer to join an interesting, innovative project”- this seems to be the most common way for software houses to advertise their vacancies. Why not ask and find out whether they are really as innovative as they claim to be.
This is actually one bad-ass question! It will probably totally surprise them and they either love it and talk excitedly for 10 minutes about that totally awesome thing they did, or they cave and tell you that they can’t do much out of the box stuff and move on to giving excuses. Use this question to let them show their hype, or a lack thereof.
Q5: Will I be mentoring others and will I be mentored by someone?
It’s pretty obvious that if you are to be the most senior in a team you will be the go-to guy for everyone. Although it’s great for the ego, it may leave you without someone to bounce ideas with, especially when you still sometimes feel you need a hand in coding your way through. Even if you are a highly experienced developer, having other experienced people around you can only be beneficial to your skills. Other seniors will be there to challenge and motivate you to reach a new level of coding prowess.
By the time you got to this stage of your dev evolution, you had probably come to realization that it’s only now you clearly see the vastness of all the things you still don’t know. Therefore, regardless of the experience you have, answer to this question should be of great interest to you.
Q6: Are there any further steps available after one becomes senior?
Woohoo, so you’re being recruited to be a senior developer and the big bucks are at stake. This is what you worked for all these years. But… umm, ever wondered where will you go from there?
How to find out if your senior job at a software house will be a dead end? Ask! They might say they have an uber-senior role, you could fill in a while. Do have them define the uber-senior :) since the difference might come down to the title and the pay check. They might want you to become a mentor to other people on the team, so you share your time 50-50 between developing code and developing others’ skills. They may want to help you build your fame as expert speaker at conferences, workshops and meetups. In any case, you should make sure that they still want to invest in your skills and are open to discuss your ideas about your future.
Q7: Do you offer training allowance & time off for training / attending conferences?
Yeah, so you learn on the job anyway, but wouldn’t it be great if they’d send you to a totally epic conference a half world away to listen to a programming icon you admire?
Conferences aside, training allowance may be used to buy useful books, tutorials etc. It’s really good to have one.
Q8: What do you do when project starts to go wrong?
Let’s face it, there isn’t a team in this world that does perfectly right every single time. What is crucial though is what happens when things start going south. The answer that you are looking for is: the company approaches every crisis situation as a learning opportunity. Then you may expect to work in an environment friendly to experimenting without fear of failure. In short, you want to be where trying and failing is better than not trying at all.
You may also try this probing question:
- Are retrospectives habitual in your company?
Now you know the questions you should ask during your next interview. Do note, all of them should be directed at the developers who conduct the technical part of the interview or a Technical Manager / Director. The HR might have a hard time answering them in a way that will give you sufficient insight.
In today’s job market, where you - developers - are a hot commodity, the competition among companies sadly comes down to the money they can pay a good dev for his/her work. Sure, a nice fat bank account is great, nobody expects you to do charity coding! However, shouldn’t you expect more than just the money?
After all, you deliver the code, and in return you get money AND experience. So if you care that the experience you gain is worth your while, feel free to question your potential future employer at length. It’s your right to leave the interview with all the information you need. It’s advisable to let the recruiter know beforehand that you have quite a few questions you’d like ask, so that they leave sufficient time during your interview for answering them.
What is your expereince asking questions at software house job interviews? Have you ever asked any of the above questions? If so, did you get answers that satisfied your curiosity and helped you decide whether you’d like to work there? What other questions would you pose? It’d be great to get your input, so feel free to comment!
Tap the ❤ button if you found this article useful!
About the Author
Agnieszka is an HR Manager at EL Passion. You can find her on LinkedIn.
Find EL Passion on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
