Questions to ask a prospective employer during a job interview

Question: Do developers in your organization have full admin rights on their own computer?

Rationale: While blocking admin rights might make sense for regular office workers it is a massive hindrance for software developers. They do need admin access for many things and not giving it to them is a direct productivity hit. You might also note that Google does give all their developers root access to their own dev machines and see how they respond.

Question: Are developers free to choose and install the operating system on their development machines? If yes, can you do all administrative and bureaucracy task from "non-official" operating systems?

Rationale: Most software projects nowadays deal with Linux somehow and many people are thus more productive (and happier) if they can use a Linux desktop for their development. If the company mandates the use of "IT-approved" Windows install where 50% of all CPU time is spent on virus scanners and the like, productivity takes a big hit. There are also some web services that either just don't work on Linux or are a massive pain to use if they do (the web UI of Outlook being a major guilty party here).

Question: How long does it take to run the CI for new merge requests?

Rationale: Anything under 10 minutes is good. Anything over 30 minutes is unacceptably slow. Too slow of a CI means that instead of submitting small, isolated commits people start aggregating many changes into a small number of mammoth commits because it is the only way to get things done. This causes the code quality to plummet.

Question: Suppose we find a simple error, like a typo in a log message. Could you explain the process one needs to follow to get that fixed and how long does it approximately take? Explicitly list out all the people in the organization that are needed to authorize said change.

Rationale: The answer to this should be very similar to the one above: make the commit, submit for review, get ack, merge. It should be done in minutes. Sometimes that is not the case. Maybe you are not allowed to work on issues that don't have an associated ticket or that are not pre-approved for the current sprint. Maybe you need to first create a ticket for the issue. Maybe you first need to get manager approval to create said ticket (You laugh, but these processes actually exist. No, I'm not kidding.). If their reply contains phrases like "you obtain approval from X", demand details: how do you apply for approval, who does it, how long is it expected to take, what happens if your request is rejected, and so on. If the total time is measured in days, draw your own conclusions and act accordingly

Question: Suppose that I need to purchase some low-cost device like a USB hub for development work. Could you explain the procedure needed to get that done? 

Rationale: The answer you want is either "go to a store of your choice, buy what you need and send the receipt to person X" or possibly "send a link to person X and it will be on your desk (or delivered home) within two days". Needing to get approval from your immediate manager is sort of ok, but needing to go any higher or sideways in the org chart is a red flag and so is needing to wait more than a few days regardless of the reason.

Question: Could you explain the exact steps needed to get the code built?

Rationale: The steps should be "do a git clone, run the build system in the standard way, compile, done". Having a script that you can run that sets up the environment is also fine. Having a short wiki page with the instructions is tolerable. Having a long wiki page with the instructions is bad. "Try compilng and when issues arise ask on slack/teams/discord/water cooler/etc" is very bad.

Question: Can you build the code and run tests on the local machine as if it was a standard desktop application?

Rationale: For some reason corporations love creating massive build clusters and the like for their products (which is fine) and then make it impossible to build the code in isolation (which is not fine). Being able to build the project on your own machine is pretty much mandatory because if you can't build locally then e.g. IDE autocompletions does not work because there is no working compile_commands.json.

This even applies for most embedded projects. A well designed embedded project can be configured so that most code can be built and tested on the host compiler and only the hardware-touching bits need cross compilation. This obviously does not cover all cases, such as writing very low level firmware that is mostly assembly. You have to use your own judgement here.

Question: Does this team or any of the related teams have a person who actively rejects proposals to improve the code base?

Rationale: A common dysfunction in existing organizations is to have a "big fish in a small pond" developer, one that has been working on said code for a long time but which has not looked at what has been happening in the software development landscape in general. They will typically hard reject all attempts to improve the code and related processes to match current best practices. They typically use phrases like "I don't think that would improve anything", "That can't work (no further reasoning given)" and the ever popular "but we already have [implementation X, usually terrible] and it works". In extreme cases if their opinions are challenged they resort to personal attacks. Because said person is the only person who truly understands the code, management is unwilling to reprimand them out of fear that they might leave.

Out of all the questions in this list, this one is the most crucial. Having to work with such a person is a miserable experience and typically a major factor in employee churn. This is also the question that prospective employers are most likely to flat out lie to you because they know that if they admit to this, they can't hire anyone. If you are interviewing with a manager, then they might not even know that they have such a person in their team. The only reliable way to know this is to talk with actual engineers after they have had several beers. This is hard to organize before getting hired.

Question: How many different IT support organizations do you have. Where are they physically located?

Rationale: The only really acceptable answer is "in the same country as your team" (There are exceptions, such as being the only employee in a given country working 100% remote). Any other answer means that support requests take forever to get done and are a direct and massive drain on your productivity. The reason for this inefficiency is that if you have your "own" support then you can communicate with each other like regular human beings. If they are physically separated then you just became just another faceless person in a never ending ticketing queue somewhere and things that should take 15 minutes take weeks (these people typically need to serve many organisations in different countries and are chronically overworked).

The situation is even worse if the IT support is moved to physically distant location and even worse if it is bought as a service from a different corporation. A typical case is that a corporation in Europe or USA outsources all their IT support to India or Bangladesh. This is problematic, not because people in said countries are not good at their jobs (I've never met them so I can't really say) but because these transfers are always done to minimize costs. Thus a core part of the organization's engineering productivity is tied to an organisation that is 5-10 time zones away, made the cheapest offer and over which you can't even exert any organizational pressure over should it be needed. This is not a recipe for success. If there are more than one such external companies within the organization, failure is almost guaranteed.

Question: Suppose the team needs to start a new web service like a private Gitlab, add new type of CI to the testing pipeline or something similar. Could you explain the exact steps needed to get it fully operational? Please list all people who need to do work to make this happen (including just giving authorization), and time estimates for each individual step.

Rationale: This follows directly from the above. Any answer that has more than one manager and takes more than a day or two is a red flag.

Question: Please list all the ways you are monitoring your employees during work hours. For example state whether you have a mandatory web proxy that everyone must use and enumerate all pieces of security and tracking software you have installed on employees' computers. Do you require all employees to assign all work hours to projects? If yes, what granularity? If the granularity is less than 1 hour, does your work sheet contain an entry for "entering data into work hour enumeration sheet"?

Rationale: This one should be fairly obvious, but note that you are unlikely to get a straight answer.