Questions to Ask Your Interviewer as a Software Engineer

“Do you have any questions for me?” usually arrives with five minutes left. Spend those minutes on “What’s the culture like?” and you may get a pleasant, useless answer.

You may spend a few years on this team. Use the time to find out what working there would be like. A specific question about how the team works also gives you a way to show what you care about in a job.

Prepare five or six questions and expect to ask two or three. Some get answered along the way, and time usually runs short.

Ask the right person

Engineers can tell you about the daily work, the hiring manager about expectations, and the recruiter about the process and pay. Save questions about the deploy pipeline for someone who uses it.

An engineer on the team

• “How does a change get from a pull request to production, and how long does that usually take?”
• “What does the on-call rotation look like? How many times were you paged last month?”
• “Which part of the codebase do people avoid touching, and why?”
• “What did the last person who joined the team work on in their first month?”
• “How does the team decide between fixing old problems and building new features?”
• “What’s one thing you’d change about how the team works?”

These questions ask for facts and recent examples. If an answer is vague, follow up on the details, such as how often someone was paged last month.

The hiring manager

• “What would you want me to have done six months after joining?”
• “What’s the team’s biggest problem right now?”
• “How do you decide what the team works on each quarter?”
• “How do you give feedback, and how often?”
• “Why is this position open?”
• “How have engineers on your team been promoted in the last couple of years?”

If you only get one question in, make it the six-month one. The answer tells you what the job really is, and you can tie your experience to it before the interview ends.

A director or VP

• “What does the company need from engineering this year?”
• “A year from now, what would make you say this team succeeded?”
• “What’s the biggest risk to the product over the next year?”

With a director or VP, focus on priorities and where the team is headed.

The recruiter

• “What are the remaining steps, and when should I expect to hear back?”
• “What level is this role, and what’s the salary range?”
• “What’s the policy on remote work and time in the office?”
• “Is there anything I should prepare for the next round?”

The recruiter is a good place to start for questions about pay, level and benefits.

Use what they told you

The best question is often one you couldn’t have prepared. If the interviewer mentioned a migration, ask how it’s going. If the coding problem came from something their team ran into, ask how they solved it. Jot down a word or two during the interview so you can come back to it at the end.

What not to ask

Skip anything the company’s website answers. “How did I do?” can put the interviewer on the spot, especially if they’re not allowed to give feedback yet.

For harder questions, ask about a situation they can describe. “How does the team handle it when a project is running late?” gives them more to work with than “Do people have to work weekends?”

If there are two minutes left

Ask the one question you most need answered. Then ask whether you can send the rest by email, and send them to the recruiter that day.

If there’s time for a last one, try “Is there anything about my background I can clarify?” It gives the interviewer a chance to raise a doubt while you’re still there to answer it.