jeremycaldwell/front-end-developer-employer-questions

A list of questions you can ask potential employers, when interviewing for a front-end development position.

Front End Developer Employer Questions

The Front-end Job Interview Questions list (https://github.com/darcyclarke/Front-end-Developer-Interview-Questions) is pretty awesome--if you're an employer. It gave me the idea to have a list of questions for front-end developers to ask prospective employers.

These questions cover employers who are large enough to have a dedicated development team. It should work reasonably well for both agencies and companies that are working on internal projects.

Interviews usually happen with both Managers and Team Members, so I've split the questions into those two general categories.

Management Questions

General Questions:

• How do you define front end development?
• What tools do you use for internal communication? (email,chat,irc)
• What is your telecommuting policy?
• How many employees are in the company?
• What department does the position report to?
  • How many people work in that department?
• How many hours do you expect in a typical day/week?
• What are standard business hours?
• What is the value of this position to your company?
• What equipment is provided with the position?
• Do you have a dress code?
• How many hours a week does a typical FED spend in meetings?

Project Management:

• Can you describe a typical project life cycle?
• What is an average project size in terms of days/weeks/team members?
• How do you organize project teams?
• Do you use any project management software?
• Do you have dedicated project managers?
  • If so, how many?
  • Are they certified / what certification?
• What is your development methodology?
  • If Agile, what is your sprint length?
• How often do you push code live?
• Do you use a bug tracking/ticketing system?
• What kind of seating arrangement do you have? (teams vs departments)

Clients:

• What percentage of clients are internal vs external?
• How often are clients in the office?
• Who is the primary POC for client interactions?
• Are FEDs expected to meet with clients?
• Do you send FEDs on sales calls?
• How do you handle difficult clients, in particular:
  • feature creep / design changes
  • "Make the logo bigger"
• Do you track hours?
  • What tools do you use?
  • How many client-billable hours do you expect per week?

Bonus Questions

• What do you think about Google's 20% policy?
• Do you send employees to tech conferences?
  • Do you let them spend working hours creating talks to give at said conferences?
• Do you ever bring in lunch/dinner during crunch times?
• Do you believe an employee should ever "stay as late as it takes to get the job done?"

Coding Team Questions

Coding Standards

• Do you have coding style guide?
  • Spaces or tabs?
• What do you use for version control?
• What is the oldest version of IE that you support?
• Do you have a preferred CMS or development platform?
• What is your standard development toolkit?
• Macs or PCs?
• Do you do code reviews?
• Do you have a coder blog?
• Do you publish your code?
• Do you allow employees to publish code?

Markup:

• HTML5 or XHTML Strict?
• Semantics fanatic or divs and spans as necessary?
• Accessibility
  • Do you use WAI-ARIA?
  • Is accessible AJAX a priority?
  • Do you ever test for accessibility with screen reader software or a testing service?

CSS:

• What, if any preprocessor do you use? (Sass, LESS, Stylus)
• Do you subscribe to any particular CSS structure? (SMACSS, OOCSS)

JavaScript:

• What JavaScript libraries do you use, if any?
• Do you prioritize building interactions that work without JS enabled, or do you accept that all users will or should have JS?

UX

• Do you have a UX team?
  • if yes, can you give me an overview of your UX process?
• Do you do user testing?
• What's your current approach to mobile?

Design

• Are FEDs involved in the design process?
  • if so, at what point?
• How many design comps are created for a typical project?
• What format do you use for design comps?

Programming

• What are the primary programming languages used?
• How many dedicated programmers do you have?
• How much time are programmers allowed to spend mentoring?

Quality Assurance:

• Do you have any dedicated QA software or hardware?
• How do you determine browsers/devices for testing?
• Do you collect metrics on site visitors and user agents?
• What percentage of a build is dedicated to QA?
• At what point in the build do you begin QA? (bonus for continuous or unit testing)