5 Questions You Should Be Asking Your Potential Engineering Manager
Interviewing for a new software engineering job can be scary, with all the coding questions and endless rounds of interviews per company. On top of that, you have to decide at the end of all of it, which company and team is the best fit where you’ll feel the happiest. It can be hard to remember that you are interviewing the company as much as the company is interviewing you. I just went through this process and focused a lot of attention on which team was right for me.
Here are 5 powerful questions to get a full understanding of what your potential team would be like:
1. How would you describe an ideal engineer on your team?
This question will give you an idea of what the manager is looking for. You will get a sense of what the manager values in engineers and see if your strengths and skillset line up to what the team needs. If you have the chance to ask this question before your interviews are over, you can even try to target the values that the manager said they are looking for.
2. In terms of percentages, how would my time be allocated for various tasks?
This will give you a clear sense of how much time you’ll spend coding, designing, bug fixing, on-call support, collaborating with other teams, meetings, etc. This will help you visualize what you’ll be doing most. Every team has a different allocation, so it is important to make sure this lines up with your expectations, especially when it comes to coding time.
3. What is the roadmap for the team for the next year?
You can get an idea of the types of projects you’ll be working on for the next year if you were to join. This also taps into the company value of what the team owns — is there aggressive development of new features, or is it more maintenance mode for the project. Will there be design aspects to the new work, collaboration with other teams in the company, heavy investment from leadership with tight deadlines? This question will help shed light on all of these areas.
4. What do you do to prevent burnout of your engineers? How much overtime should I expect on this team?
This question will most likely lead to an answer saying how the manager tries to prevent burnout for their engineers, of course. At the end of the day, they are also trying to sell YOU on their team, but you must read in between the lines on their response for this one. Do they bring up tight deadlines or work on the weekends? Are they clear about a 40-hour workweek expectation? As with all of these questions, there is no “right” answer, the “right” answer is ultimately whatever you are looking for. You may be looking for a highly fast-paced team working aggressively to deliver new features, or you may want the more normal 9–5 workweek where your work-life balance is more balanced.
5. How do you allocate work on the team?
Most answers will be something like, “whoever is available with the skillset” or “whoever is interested”. This is another one where you read between the lines. Does it sound like the same people are always getting the “new and shiny” work? Are the more senior engineers always driving the projects? Are there single points of failure on the team through tribal knowledge not being spread across the team? Good managers will say, they focus on developing their engineers and match projects based on growth opportunities for their engineers. They might encourage more junior engineers to take on leadership roles for smaller projects to help develop those engineers. Ultimately, you want to get a sense of if the manager finds the deliverables more important, or the engineers’ growth more important.
These 5 questions are not the only questions you should be asking. There are countless questions to ask and you won’t ever be penalized for asking too many. Some other questions I found useful are:
What is the tech stack on the team?
What is the team culture like?
How would you describe your manager?
How do you promote experimentation on the team?
What is your least favorite part about the company?
Always make a list of questions before talking with the manager so you don’t forget anything important and feel free to take notes during the meeting so you can look back on the answers. At the end of the day, you must remember, you are interviewing the company as much as the company is interviewing you.
