While preparing for my round of onsite interviews at Eventbrite, I spent some time coming up with questions tailored to the different roles of the people I’d be meeting with. I thought I would share those here.
Here are some questions for project or engineering management:
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What do you think of the size and structure on engineering teams at your company?
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How does work on a project flow through different teams?
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Do you have any recurring problems, either in production or in product schedules?
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How do you balance tradeoffs between cost, speed, and quality on projects?
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What metrics do you measure your engineering teams against? How do these relate to things important to the business?
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What is your vision for engineering at your company?
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What do you want most from the systems engineering team?
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How do you measure success of the systems engineering team?
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How do you decide when to build vs buy? How do you evaluate the business benefit and cost of technology choices?
Here are some for developers:
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How does a feature flow from development on an engineer’s laptop into production?
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How do you design systems for scalability?
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What has a higher priority, new features or stability?
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When and how do you perform load testing?
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What is the review process for architectural decisions?
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How do developers get insight into the operational load of their products?
And here are some for the systems engineering team:
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What is the release process for a configuration change?
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What is the release process for your main application? How often is it released?
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How many times are you paged outside of hours during a week on call?
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What is the security audit process?
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What caused the last site outage and how did you conduct the postmortem?
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How do you measure and manage risk of changes?
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What are the teams values or principles?
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How do you collaborate with development teams?
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What is your planning process for a sprint? A quarter?
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How do you classify and track the time the team spends on different types of tasks?
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What are the biggest projects the team accomplished last year?
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What do you want to accomplish this year?