Reverse Interview

Laws of questions

Don't ask yes/no question, ask how
Make the question so it requires the knowledge to answer not the wild guesses

Questions - Brain Dump

Code Quality
- What architectural patterns is your team using? #nocope
- Do your team know and uses approaches like, would you like to describe them?: #nocope #motiv
  - Clean Architecture
  - Hexagonal Architecture
  - Event Sourcing
- Is your team employing DDD? Can I see their aggregates and Services? #nocope #motiv #growth
  - ...further questions about laws of aggregates etc.
  - what are your aggregates and bounded contexts
    - How do you define the aggregates/contexts boundaries
- Do you have a written convention guidelines in your team? #nocope
  - What level are these convention covering: Code Style, Code Structure, Architecture?
  - How are you enforcing these guidelines?
- What problems are your frameworks, libraries/systems, approaches solving in your application? #nocope
  - e.g. Axon/Spring, Kafka, CQRS
  - What are your processes for testing and deployment, how often do you deploy?
    - What tools do you use for it? Etc. k8s, terraform?
    - Do you do canary, A/B rollouts if yes, how?
People Management
- Time management
  - Do I have to work after hours after I go to do something outside work? #nocope
  - Is there a time to reserve for my own initiatives #nocope #growth #motiv
  - How much time could I reserve for conferences as a: #growth #motiv
    - speaker
    - attendee
  - What is the time pressure in a team #nocope
    - what was your team's refactor that you are proud of
    - what and when were the latest introduced changes from retrospective
    - Do you do any overtime?
- Growth Management #growth
  - What people were recently promoted in your team and why?
- Team Management #nocope
  - What are the motivations of your team members
  - What was your most challenging teammate's feedback/request and how have you solved it?
  - Why has the last employee quitted the company?

#nocope - team isn't accruing infra/tech/management debt = hygienic factors are ok #restorative #focus
#growth - company makes sure you grow and there is a lot of buffer for learning
#motiv(ation) - cool tech, craftmanship, DDD and other fantastic stuff that tickles my winkies

Questions - Sorted Trash :)

Main Concerns:

If team doesn't have much time pressure (cause)
and is quite autonomous (cause)
with really mature skills and technologies (cause)
it will have time to improve and automate (result)
and have time to do any things around their job (result)
- personal motivation

Revamped Questions:

What is the time pressure in a team
- Do your people have time to take additional responsibilities out of scope of their daily tasks? What are they?
Autonomy
- What were the two biggest decisions your team have taken alone?
Knowledge and patterns
- Do your team know and uses approaches like Hex, CleanArch, Event Sourcing, would you like to describe them?:
- Is your team employing DDD? Can I see their aggregates and services?
- What frameworks, libraries and patterns are you using and what problems are those solving?
- What are your processes for testing and deployment, how often do you deploy?
Refactor of the code and migration of data
- what was your team's refactor that you are proudest of?
- what was your biggest migration that you needed to do to improve quality of the code?
- what and when were the latest introduced changes from a retrospective?
- what is the biggest impediment in daily work that you haven't yet fixed or automated?
Doing things outside
- Do you have any people presenting on the conferences?
- How much time person can reserve for its own initiatives like meetups and presentations?
- What interesting things person has learned when working here and shared with other people?
- How much time can person reserve for knowledge sharing and learning?
Personal motivation
- What is the current roadmap in the project?
- What are currently technologies on your tech radar?
- How can I grow to become architect/staff or team leader/manager here?

Better stuff

Expected Responses:
Q: Do your people have time to take additional responsibilities out of scope of their daily tasks? What are they?
A: Yes, they ake responsibilities that help them to growth in given path.
Score: Impact (3/5) Verifiability (3/5)

Q: What were the two biggest decisions your team have taken alone?
A: In microservice environment team should be able to decide on their tech stack etc.
Score: Impact (3/5) Verifiability (5/5)

Q: Do your team know and uses approaches like Hex, CleanArch, Event Sourcing, would you like to describe them?:
A: Team should be using approaches that gives them flexibility of change, or otherwise they will rise a lot of tech debt.
Score: Impact (5/5) Verifiability (3/5)

Q: Is your team employing DDD? Can I see their aggregates and services?
A: Aggregates should be POJOs in java not using anything outside of domain scope.
Events should be triggered with transaction via e.g. outbox pattern or event store.
Score: Impact (5/5) Verifiability (5/5)

Q: What frameworks, libraries and patterns are you using and what problems are they solving?
A: Keeping the boilercode to minimum is a must, that's why Spring or something wise would be fitting.
Cargo cult without a problem to solve is a red flag.
Score: Impact (3/5) Verifiability (3/5)

Q: What are the processes for testing and deployment, how often do you deploy?
A: Testing: Minimum contract tests is a must. Lack of them (and e2e tests) is a fucking red flag.
Deployment: Infrastructure as a code that is easily understandable and frequent deploys are nice.
Score: Impact (4/5) Verifiability (4/5)

Q: What was your team's refactor that you are proudest of
A: Teams must have at least few high impactful refactors, if not they are accruing the hardest code debt.
Score: Impact (4/5) Verifiability (4/5)

Q: What was your biggest migration that you needed to do to improve quality of the code?
A: If teams are not confortable with migrations then it will be accruing the horriblest code debt.
Score: Impact (5/5) Verifiability (4/5)

Q: What and when were the latest introduced changes from a retrospective?
A: Team needs to improve all the time. Without, it will die.
Score: Impact (3/5) Verifiability (4/5)

Q: What is the biggest impediment in daily work that you haven't yet fixed or automated?
A: Things that are reoccuring or heavily impactful should be automated.
Score: Impact (4/5) Verifiability (3/5)

Q: Do you have any people presenting on the conferences?
A: If not, then it can have severe consequences in the culture. I don't want to work in such company.
Score: Impact (3/5) Verifiability (5/5)

Q: How much time person can reserve for its own initiatives like meetups and presentations?
A: If you may not use company time for things like this, then you won't be able to grow.
Score: Impact (4/5) Verifiability (4/5)

Q: What interesting things person has learned when working here and shared with other people?
A: It shows if you will be working in thriving community or echo chamber.
Score: Impact (3/5) Verifiability (3/5)

Q: How much time can person reserve for knowledge sharing and learning? Do you have brownbags? Can person just add a time slot for it?
A: Hard constraints like 20% for learning is well welcomed. Ability to plan such activity is a must.
Score: Impact (5/5) Verifiability (3/5)

Q: What is the current roadmap in the project?
A: See if there is something challenging.
Score: Impact (5/5) Verifiability (5/5)

Q: What are currently technologies on your tech radar?
A: See if the company is stable or growing.
Score: Impact (3/5) Verifiability (3/5)

Q: How can I grow to become architect/staff or team leader/manager here?
A: If becoming higher in position you need to wait for the opportunities, then you are fucked.
Score: Impact (5/5) Verifiability (3/5)

Chill talk questions

Q: I am a person who defines himself as a craftsman, team leader wannabe and I love facilitation. How would you see my role in the company?
Q: What are your teams, their functions etc? What is the topology of your organisation?
Q: Do you have some common practices? Like DDD, Team Topologies other interesting approaches?
Q: What is the tech stack? How open are you to try new technologies? Tech radar? Tech Radar
Q: What is the pressure?