It is quite common that the interviewer asks the applicant. As I have long unemployment under COVID19, I would like to share my experience that what I would like to ask within the interview. In order to have a basic understanding of the company that you might be working for next.
If is.a.first.call {
!told.him.about.very.tech
told.him.about.your.company.in.high.level.filter(
func (it anyThing){
return (
it.can.be === "company name" ||
it.can.be === "company business model" ||
it.can.be === "your title" ||
it.can.be === "job duty" ||
)
}
)
}Understand the company first
- What is the budget for this opening?
Everyone are code for food, if the budget does not match your expectation. It is better to have an early return here.
2. What is the name of the company?
It is the first place to understand the company. However, If you apply to the company directly without agency you can skip this one.
Do not share your resume or cv before those agencies address the name of the company. You need to know collecting those documents from the subject is one of the KPI in their job.
3. What is their domain or industry and what they are doing?
It is a straightforward question, you can evaluate that it is what you happy to work or want to have a career with.
For instance, I dislike working with the Casino industry as I think they actually rob the customers.
A company should be honest and confident to share their business model and their revenue model.
E.g. Uber is making money with an intermediary role.
4. Why the company has this opening (turnover or new headcount)?
It might come with natural turnover or product expansion meaning it is a new headcount. As some of the company has a high turnover rate, it might be related to many factors ( working culture, long working hours or low increment, etc)
Again, a company should be honest and confident to share this information with you. And you can always find the clue for it.
5. The location of the company and the working hours?
Owning a car is not common in Hong Kong, most likely you need to use public transportation daily. Measuring the hours that you can spend on transportation can help you have enough rest, time-saving, and rent a place nearby.
For instance, If you are living in the countryside of Hong Kong that you might need to spend > 1 hour daily on the subway for a single trip.
6. Do they own their product?
It is not common in Hong Kong that a company owns a product. Many of the company act as a vendor and survive by how many active contracts on-hands.
Vendors normally drive their development cycle by external factors such as customer budget, the committed deadline, etc.
Unlike software in-house, they might not have enough resource to train you or offer better software ( good coding coverage, good documentation, refactoring phase ).
7. It is a contracted opening or permanent?
It is a straightforward question, you can evaluate that it is what you happy to work or want to have a career with. Some of the companies have a huge gap of outsourced opening, contracted staff, and permanent.
Understand the job function
8. What do they want for this opening?
The company might share their expectation with you. For instance, they kick-off a new project and willing to move it to the Cloud. They want to hire you to conduct the tasks for it.
Or, they enter serial B funding, and willing to build a QA engineering team to automatize their manual test, therefore they expect you able to help them to setup the whole team.
It is good the understand their expectation and see it is matched your professional or skill set. Otherwise, you might feel lost as you do not have a good expectation modeling in this opening.
9. Who I report to?
It is the first step for you to understand the company’s structure. You might able to see the hierarchy in their development team.
For instance, you might report to a team lead directly or report to CTO directly, etc.
People always prefer flat management in their working space and it is a chance for you to know it.
Understand their development teams
10. How many engineering teams within the company and What is their function for each team?
The company normally divide their development team by product. For instance, they have a user app team to do the mobile-related task and an API team to offer the endpoints for company wides usage.
The company should happily share that information do you, it offers a big picture for you about how many engineers you need to deal with later as the amount of the teams might create a lot of overhead and ask for many backs and forth.
11. What the structure of each team?
They should respond to the layout of each team and you can have an expectation for what they want from your skillset and professional.
I give an example here, A team with follow structure.
> Team leader x1, Jr. engineer x2, QA engineer x1.
They might expect you to act as a senior engineer and help the team leader when he/she onleave. Also, it means you might need to do some team admin jobs.
Plus they might told you like this also.
> Frontend engineer x2, DevOps engineer x1, Sr. Backend engineer x1.
In this case you able to know it is a feature team and you might act as a full stack engieer.
12. Do the development team use Scrum or Agile Or Kanban for project management? Or just Email or Excel?
It is a critical question and you should ask in each interview. As you can see how a company planning in their development and product. A good company should have a long and short term plan for the business.
Project management is a way for you to inspect this company always deal with the ad-hoc issues or they always have a backlog to store their issues and file them to ticket when they try to resolve any problems.
13. What kind of instant message tools do they use Slack, MS Team, Whatsapp, or Email?
As engineer communication is taking an important role in our daily, You can find the priority from their message tools.
WhatsApp > Email >Slack, MS Team
As we are not the fresh graduate anymore, I think you can find the expected response time from those tools. From instant level to asynchronous.
If a company expect all request will be instant or ASAP that they will heavy using WhatsApp.
If a company expects some report from a production issue and willing to file it better that will put it to Email and share to all of us and hope what we can learn from it.
So you can always find the clue from those tools about the culture of the company.
Interview related question
14. How many rounds of the interview?
You can have good progress in the interview as some company might ask for 4 to 5 round before they give you any offer.
15. How long of the application in order to walk through all the interview sections?
Like question 14, some company applications might be taken up to a half-year for some reason like background checking .etc.
It is always good to have this information in order to prepare your applciation. If it is a long application that we can expect that email response will also be long.
16. Can we conduct the interview via an online video meeting?
Under COVID19, many companies able to offer an online interview to ensure we are in a safe environment and show care to their staff. It is a good clue to see those factors.
If a company insists to have face 2 face interview, that you might expect they might have some priority above the health of their staff.
17. Who will interview me? The team leader? CTO?
Understand the person that you need to work with during the interview is always a good thing. If your interviewer comes with the same background like you such as startup experience. It is easier for you to put the interview in the same loop or in the same page as you are speaking the common term and wording.
For CTO or senior management, what they expected is more on the business side and you should able to have this knowledge about their business. Do not act like a person who knows nothing about their business and interview with senior management.
For a team leader or more hands-on person, you are expected to have tech-related questions e.g. coding question, system design, and tech concept.
18. How many candidates placed in the application pipeline?
Again, you can know how competitive this opening and modeling your expectation for this opening.
Might be the HR is working 100+ people in this opening or the opening only has few applications.
19. What do you think about the future of the company? any short-term or long-term plan?
A good company always has a plan. In the short-term, they might want to bring up a feature from their competitors like Uber and Grap both have a favorite driver list. In the long-term, Uber might want to introduce an enterprise-facing B2B order placing API for enterprise booking. So, It is a good moment for you to understand the company plan or show how their understanding of their company.
Other
20. Do they have outsourced or contracted developers?
It means that you might need to work with some engineer outside. It also increases the overhead for communication.
21. Do they mainly speaking English?
Some of the company in Hong Kong does not speak English / Cantonese and they might speak Mandarin mainly. It is good for you to understand which language that you might use daily.
22. Am I need to fill the timesheet for my work?
If your company is old-school that they might ask the staff to fill the timesheet about the task in each month. It is expected that those admin works are costing your time.
23. Do they use Mac or Windows as an OS?
Some companies will give you a Macbook and some will give you a PC. It is okay but you might need to prepare the working environment based on the OS. Like I have a
.zshrcto sync working environment.
Benefits
24. Do they ask for on-call?
The company might ask the engineer to on-call and you better know it. Otherwise, you might feel surprised.
25. After on-call am I get a compensatory leave?
Like question 24, some companies can offer a paid leave for you after you complete an on-call cycle. It also shows the care from the company about the staff. A tired staff can give a huge issue in production like a tried engineer from Gitlab run
rm -rf /in their production.“Behind the scenes, a tired sysadmin, working late at night in the Netherlands, had accidentally deleted a directory” — Gitlab
Reference: https://www.theregister.com/2017/02/01/gitlab_data_loss/?utm_source=webopsweekly&utm_medium=email
26. Salary review window? Each session or year?
Code for food, understand when increment will happen can give you better career plan.
I hope those questions can help you have a basic image for any company.
