I was wondering if anyone else had any questions they always asked the interviewer in the “we’ll give you five minutes at the end to ask us questions” bit in interviews.

Personally I always ask what the staff turnover rate is. Mainly because in my first dev job I was one of four people who started on the same day. One of the other guys left after two days, I left after six weeks, and another guy left after two months.

Another I’ll be asking after my current job is if they have a mainframe. I’ve now worked at three companies with mainframes and they all were old corporations where they were outsourcing loads of stuff to unhelpful companies (often IBM) which generally meant lots of headaches.

  • Except for the macOS thing. We’re a Linux shop, noob ;)

    Ha! I’d be fine working on a Linux machine! It’s that *nix terminal I’m addicted to. I just love the MacOS trackpad “gestures” and Homebrew has been a pleasure. Everything I deploy is to Docker/Linux environments anyway. I just really don’t want to develop on Windows if I don’t have to.

    Thanks for the feedback! 🫡

    • Tbh, these days WSL2 might be slightly better than macOS at being Linux. As it is Linux (in a very transparent vm) instead of posix or *nix

      But for most dev work all three are good options. I’ve noticed that once you start deploying against stuff like kubernetes or, less so, doing docker stuff you run into limitations on Mac and wsl2. Just random weirdness, especially with new the m1 chips and say cockroachdb. At that point there’s no substitute for the real thing :)