Interviewing the interviewer
Published: 2020-10-16 14:14:45

The interview is not only getting asked to invert a binary tree for working on a Rails shop or designing a microservice architecture with Kafka to solve the business imaginary scaling challenges. It is also an opportunity for you to understand little bit about the company and people you'll work with.

This is a compilation of questions and what you might learn from them when interviewing for a job. Consider this a list of suggestions to use as a foundation to write your own.

## Team and company structure questions
Here you check how different parts and teams connect to each other and how your team fits in the big picture.

### What's the team structure? Who I'll report to?
This is to learn how the company works. Here you can learn if the hierarchy is explicit or implicit, the later also known as "Oh, we don't have a hierarchy here".

### How's the onboarding process looks like and what are the expectations?
Once you start on the job, if you're going to receive help fitting into your role and in how much time the company expects you to be productive. Here you can check how much support will be provided for new employees.

### What is the turnover? How many people left the team?
If a considerable amount of people left the team, it can be one or more of the following, though not restricted to:
 - Toxic environment
 - Team is not a priority
 - Job is not interesting
 - Mismanagement

### Did you have a conflict within the company? How it was handled? Someone was fired?
If yes, ask them to tell the story. You can learn a bunch of stuff here:
- How management deals with a**holes
- How conflict resolution works there

### What is the journey the code takes from my machine to production?
Code reviews, trunk based development, CI/CD...? This is where we check some indicatives about the quality and real development processes

## Career

### How's the career ladder?
Can you advance your career inside the company without having to go into management roles? Usually larger companies have this well defined.

### Do you have training/books/conference budget?
Do they invest in their workforce?

### Can developers contribute to open source tools you use?
Perhaps not only the company gives back to community, but it is also invests on technology it depends on. 

## Business
Most of people are very fond of getting paid for their work. That said, it is important to know where the money comes from and goes to.

### What is the churn rate?
How many users/clients you lose every year/month? You might ask this both about the company in general or your specific team, in case it is a multiple product company.

### How many new users? Is it a net positive?
Customers always come and go, but if there is no net positive, business might be struggling.

### How were you affected by corona virus?
In some countries (like Germany) you have a trial period where is surprisingly easy to fire people during it. When the first wave hit, guess who was fired to cut costs?

### Did the company achieve break even? If not, what is the projection? If yes, what's the profit in % ?
"Break even" is the term for: "revenue >= costs"
This is one of my personal favourites, and I've seen founders get uncomfortable with this one.

### Given you keep your current revenue + funding, how long can the company continue its operations?
This is a important one for startups that didn't achieve break even.

## Closing thoughts
There are a lot more questions you can ask. Remember, use your own judgment to pick the time and the person you'll ask each one. I've seen some of these questions leaving a few interviewers uncomfortable(though they shouldn't).
I believe some of these questions balance the power dynamics of the interview process between both parties and some interviewers don't like that.