interview-questions-to-maybe-ask.md

questions for potential employers

management

• General Questions:
  • How do you define front end development?
  • What tools do you use for internal communication? (email,chat,irc)
  • What is your telecommuting policy?
  • How many employees are in the company?
  • What department does the position report to?
    • How many people work in that department?
  • How many hours do you expect in a typical day/week?
  • What are standard business hours?
  • What is the value of this position to your company?
  • What equipment is provided with the position?
  • Do you have a dress code?
  • How many hours a week does a typical FED spend in meetings?
• Project Management:
  • Can you describe a typical project life cycle?
  • What is an average project size in terms of days/weeks/team members?
  • How do you organize project teams?
  • Do you use any project management software?
  • Do you have dedicated project managers?
    • If so, how many?
    • Are they certified / what certification?
  • What is your development methodology?
    • If Agile, what is your sprint length?
  • How often do you push code live?
  • Do you use a bug tracking/ticketing system?
  • What kind of seating arrangement do you have? (teams vs departments)
• Clients:
  • What percentage of clients are internal vs external?
  • How often are clients in the office?
  • Who is the primary POC for client interactions?
  • Are FEDs expected to meet with clients?
  • Do you send FEDs on sales calls?
  • How do you handle difficult clients, in particular:
    • feature creep / design changes
    • "Make the logo bigger"
  • Do you track hours?
    • What tools do you use?
    • How many client-billable hours do you expect per week?
• Bonus Questions
  • What do you think about Google's 20% policy?
  • Do you send employees to tech conferences?
    • Do you let them spend working hours creating talks to give at said conferences?
  • Do you ever bring in lunch/dinner during crunch times?
  • Do you believe an employee should ever "stay as late as it takes to get the job done?"

dev team

• Coding Standards
  • Do you have coding style guide?
    • Spaces or tabs?
  • What do you use for version control?
  • What is the oldest version of IE that you support?
  • Do you have a preferred CMS or development platform?
  • What is your standard development toolkit?
  • Macs or PCs?
  • Do you do code reviews?
  • Do you have a coder blog?
  • Do you publish your code?
  • Do you allow employees to publish code?
• Markup:
  • HTML5 or XHTML Strict?
  • Semantics fanatic or divs and spans as necessary?
  • Accessibility
    • Do you use WAI-ARIA?
    • Is accessible AJAX a priority?
    • Do you ever test for accessibility with screen reader software or a testing service?
• CSS:
  • What, if any preprocessor do you use? (Sass, LESS, Stylus)
  • Do you subscribe to any particular CSS structure? (SMACSS, OOCSS)
• JavaScript:
  • What JavaScript libraries do you use, if any?
  • Do you prioritize building interactions that work without JS enabled, or do you accept that all users will or should have JS?
• UX
  • Do you have a UX team?
    • if yes, can you give me an overview of your UX process?
  • Do you do user testing?
  • What's your current approach to mobile?
• Design
  • Are FEDs involved in the design process?
    • if so, at what point?
  • How many design comps are created for a typical project?
  • What format do you use for design comps?
• Programming
  • What are the primary programming languages used?
  • How many dedicated programmers do you have?
  • How much time are programmers allowed to spend mentoring?
• Quality Assurance:
  • Do you have any dedicated QA software or hardware?
  • How do you determine browsers/devices for testing?
  • Do you collect metrics on site visitors and user agents?
  • What percentage of a build is dedicated to QA?
  • At what point in the build do you begin QA? (bonus for continuous or unit testing)