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List: questions to ask during a job interview

Sylwia Vargas on April 02, 2021

As I have recently again gone through the stressful ordeal of job interviewing, I wanted to record my process so that if you are currently job sear...
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Dana Ottaviani

This is wonderful.

A question I find myself asking is: "does the company have internal documentation (technical and not)?" If they say they are struggling with this, it's a red flag. Documentation is one of the key things to help someone onboard into a new role in a company. Not documenting your processes or even to understand more how the company works together is a problem.

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Sylwia Vargas

I sooooo agree (especially that currently I work as a technical writer and my job is to maintain good docs). I'll add this question to the list!

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Sam Markham

This is excellent, thank you so much for sharing! I will definitely be using some of these in interviews coming up :) I particularly appreciate your notes on who the questions are for and why you're asking some of them!

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Sylwia Vargas

Thank you for this feedback. I feel that job search is so stressful (especially if you’re new to the field) that in itself it requires a lot of “studying”. We oftentimes tell people what to do but not our motivation behind it. I worried that the notes would make the post a bit too lengthy so I appreciate your feedback!

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Sam Markham

You're very welcome! And yes, I definitely agree about the job search being stressful and requiring studying. For my part, I've spent a lot of time looking up good questions to ask in job interviews, and have used some of them, but haven't always been sure why I've been asking them other than to have something to say? Hearing about the motivation behind asking the questions is super helpful, both for situations where someone I've asked a question asks me to clarify what I mean, and for framing follow-up questions. (And just, deciding what questions align with what I really want to know!) I think the length of this post is a feature, not a bug--and the table of contents helps too!

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Alexandra

Needed this post! Great write up Sylwia

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Sylwia Vargas

Thank you, Alex!
I felt very lost three years ago and definitely not ready for job search in the US and I just want to make it easier for others 💕

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Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴

Well, this looks awesome. I'm taking many from here to add to my personal list

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Sylwia Vargas

Awesome! Do you have any other personal favorites that have worked for you?

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Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴

Yes, I do. Here in Colombia we have lots of holidays (18 xD) and whenever I'm interviewing for a foreign company I have to ask about them. Also, I don't like time tracking, I need to ask about it.

The ones I consider important are:

  • Am I required to log working hours?
  • Do you accept Colombian holidays?
  • What's the preferred working hours?

Depending of the size of the team these ones also matter to me:

  • Is there a QA team?
  • Is there a DevOps team?
  • Do you work under agile methodologies?

The list is constantly being modified as I learn how to make the right question to get the best answer.

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Sylwia Vargas

Ohhhh these are all terrific! The one that stood out to me was the one about the Colombian holidays — this is also something I usually ask because in Poland we tend to take longer time off during Easter and Christmas than in the US.
Thank you!

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Tony Edgal

This is actually nice, I love how the questions are tailored.

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Sylwia Vargas

Thank you ✨

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Waverley Leung

Thank you so much for this resource ❤️ I appreciate how you organized your questions based on who to ask them to (especially for individuals)! Will be using this as a guide for the future 👀

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Sylwia Vargas

Thank you for this comment, Waverley! I hope you will get the answers you're interested in!