
Interviewing requires _a lot_ of time and energy. Maybe you need to study some technical topics ahead of time. You probably already have commitments that require a lot of your focus&mdash;like another job or children. That's why it's important to be selective where you can about companies you want to interview with.

Here are the ten questions I'm using to decide whether or not I'm interested in interviewing with a company:

1. How large is the engineering team?
2. What is the make-up of the engineering team? Such as, how many managers are there, who do they manage, etc.
3. How often are one-on-ones?
4. Who are the one-on-ones with?
5. Is there career coaching?
6. Are there performance reviews?
7. How have you handled performance reviews with the pandemic?
8. What's the development process like? For example, do you work in sprints?
9. How tasks are estimated and assigned?
10. Are there regular team retrospectives?


It's important to ask questions early to find out if you even want to work somewhere.

10 Questions I'm Asking All Companies Before Scheduling Any Interviews


There's no such thing as a stupid question. There may be stupid timing for it, such as a student asking when an exam is 5 minutes after the teacher already announced that information. But that was still a good question, they just asked it at a horrible time.

In general, there are not too many restrictions on asking questions. It's a lot about timing them. For example, you don't want to ask too many specific questions about implementation details if you're still trying to find out what a client needs in a potential product. Their needs are _probably_ going to change every time you talk to them at this point and planning the implementation too rigorously could be a waste of time.

So, what are the benefits of breaking out of your fear of asking questions and just doing it?

## Learning, learning, learning

To an extent, who cares how they feel about you asking a bunch of questions? Your career is yours and only you can be responsible for taking it to the next level.

## Making new friends

I can't tell you how many people I've met through the DEV Community site and Twitter over this past month. It's really exciting how much support you can find in this industry if you put yourself out there.

## Building your confidence

Sometimes the scariest part about asking questions is knowing _how_ to ask them. You can make 10 attempts at Googling something and Google isn't going to judge you for doing it. Re-wording a question to a human a few times to make sure you're getting the right information? That can potentially be frustrating for both of you. But good news! The more you ask questions, the better you get at wording them.

Have any insight on questions that you'd like to share? Leave a comment or [send me a tweet](https://twitter.com/ashleemboyer)! :)


I'm an engineer and a natural-born master of asking questions. I used to be afraid of it, but there's really no reason to be.

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