• Can you describe the team’s biggest technical challenges right now
• How does the company encourage innovation? (Shows you value creativity.)
• Tell me about your last major migration. How long did it take and how long did you say it was going to take before you started?
• Let’s say I’m the person you hire. 6 months have gone by, what’s different?
• How much annual turnover do you have?
• How are people who experiment treated?

Do you have a blameless culture? If so please describe a time and situation that demonstrates this, and your involvement.

A few interview questions to consider.

• Has a developer ever been working on something really important and was asked for an estimate and it ended up taking 6 months longer because they learned something along the way that hadn’t occurred to them at the time of the estimate?

• Tell me about someone who was in my position who did really well. What did they do?

  • Look for red flags, long hours, firefighting.

• Tell me about someone who went “above and beyond”. What did they do?

  • Look for red flags, long hours, firefighting.

I think developers are the only group of people who want to practice solo, perform solo, and yet considers themselves on a team — while at the same time— never wanting to practice, perform, or improve together because it’ll hurt their individual PR, ticket, lines-written count.

A few interview questions to consider.

• What’s the whole process for getting one line of code changed into production?

  • I once had to remove a link from an admin dashboard. The process to do that was 52 steps.

• Humility is an enabling principle that precedes learning and improvement. A manager must be willing to seek input, listen carefully, and continuously learn. They do not know it all and readily admits that. When you have done this? How often?

• How do speed and quality relate?

  • After they answer: Does frequency of feedback affect this, and if so, how?

• What does the phrase “test in production” mean to you?

• Who owns the board? Is it viewed as Products board?

• Do you put ticket numbers on each commit?

• Do you incentivize improvements? And how soon? What type of improvements do you value?

• How do you recognize when you’re stuck in the “we’ve always done it this way” trap?

• Are developers treated more like a line cook or a doctor?

• In order to get better, you have to be intentional. If you’re not intentional, you’ll be average. What are you doing to be intentional?

• I found myself fixing bugs constantly in the past few jobs I’ve been in. They didn’t have good practices, always rushing around, which led to bugs, and it was a constant firefight. What’s the situation like here?

• How often are you changing our process to try to make yourself more effective?

  • (there should be many recent examples).

• What question did you wish you would have asked before you started working here?

• If you’re the manager of a 7 person dev team, how many separate concurrent initiatives do you have? How did you reach that number?

• If your team uses PR’s, how do you handle large refactorings? Do you have to create a story/ticket just for the refactoring? If it’s a large refactoring and other work is going on, do you plan on having a messy merge conflict when that time comes? How do you encourage small changes like typos, small refactorings, etc? Do you roll them into bigger PR’s and deal with the merge conflicts that others have later?

• (If they bring up story points) How many dollars does a story point save or make?

A few interview questions to consider.

• Why did the last person in this role leave?
• How many long timers have left recently? Why?
• Is deploying difficult? How often do you do it?
• Do you assign tasks to individual people?
• Do you seek simplicity? What was a complicated process that as a team you were able to simplify?
• Do you limit WIP? If not, how to fix bottlenecks in your process?
• If everyone in the standup is busy with something, is that a red flag or a good thing?
  • (no way that team is efficient. )
• How often is the question “How am I wrong?” asked?
• What is your improvement strategy?
• Do you deploy on Fridays? Why not?
• Do you measure the queues - i.e. how long things wait to be reviewed, to be QA’d, to be deployed? What are those numbers?
• Do you ever commit a change that you do not trust?
• What corners do you cut? What corners have you cut?
• “Follow the plan” or “incorporate feedback”?