tBaxter/questions-for-employers

A big collection of useful questions to ask potential employers. From an Ex-adhoc employee

Summary

"questions-for-employers" is a Markdown collection of questions job candidates can ask potential employers. The README organizes the questions into 13 themed sections, each with commentary on what responses signal. It is reference material, not a code library, so there is nothing to install or build.

What it is useful for

The repository is most useful to engineers preparing for job interviews, particularly when they want to evaluate the company as much as the company evaluates them. Each section covers a distinct concern: onboarding ("What is the onboarding process like?"), work/life balance (asking how many hours senior management works), culture (asking who tends to succeed or fail there), bureaucracy (walking through expensing a specific item), compensation, leadership, performance evaluation, and engineering-specific topics like code review, deployment, and technical debt. The README also notes when certain questions are inappropriate, such as asking publicly traded companies about profitability since that information is already public.

Many questions come with red-flag indicators. The author flags "culture fit" language as a warning sign of a homogenous, non-inclusive culture, points to turnover above 30% in a year as a serious problem, and treats stack-ranking as a concern. The "For engineering orgs" section covers code review processes, deployment responsibility, and the team's approach to technical debt, which are directly relevant to software engineers.

How engineers can use it

Treat the README as a menu, not a checklist. The author notes there is no time to ask every question, so read the role description and your initial phone screen notes, then pick a handful that match what you actually want to learn. The "Getting started" section itself suggests asking about onboarding, first 60-90 day priorities, and success criteria for the role as a useful starting trio.

When the interview arrives, listen as much as you talk. The repository includes prompts for follow-ups, such as asking what the failure modes of a given culture are or how disagreements get resolved. The diversity, equity, and inclusion section includes pointed questions, for example asking whether the company offers trans-inclusive health coverage or only maternity leave, which can reveal priorities even when the topic does not directly affect you.

This is a document, not a tool. There are no setup steps, dependencies, or commands. To use it, clone or fork the repository and read the README, or simply bookmark it on GitHub. For director-and-above questions, the README points readers to a separate list by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.