For a long time I was in the mistaken position of not asking questions in interviews. After several bad careers decisions I decided that enough was enough. I needed to learn how to figure out if the company in question was good so I wrote a questionnaire to ask in interviews. I got some success just questioning my interviewer about their internal technology stack, what does he/she thinks about the technology they were using and such and such.

The thing is that we get older and wiser. And now I think the most important thing that we should try to learn from an interview before signing anything is how well establish the organization’s processes are. I’m talking about the things that really matter to deliver actual value to the business.

It is not enough to know that the company is using an “agile methodology” you should figure out if they are actually committed to the benefits of following such methodology. You should figure out if the company is actually committed to delivering well crafted code. Are they doing test driven development? Are they doing continues improvement to the code through refactoring? If you can’t figure this out in the interview then you should reconsider if that company will be a good fit for you.

Probably you are thinking but I need a job right away. And I understand that but you shouldn’t be putting yourself in a position of suffering; believe me when I say this if you don’t figure out the amount of effort that you will have to do to just deliver value to that company you will suffer. To me life is too short to be miserable most of the time and since we spend a lot of time at work is better to find the place that is actually align with our values and goals so we can smile more often about the things that we love the most, coding.