Questions to ask

Org

What problem do we solve?
- Follow-up: Strengths? Challenges?
Is the business profitable? Or are we in a high-growth phase burning money?
- This is relevant to know which kind of company are you joining. Even for internal transfers, it’s relevant. Knowing the layoffs last year you may want to be careful on joining a business that it’s unprofitable.
How are teams organized?
- Follow-up: How do we collaborate or are we just separate teams that happen to report to the same skip-level manager or directors
How is the onboarding and ramp-up process for new hires?
- Follow-up: What are the expected contributions for this level? Like first month, first 3 months, first 6 months.
How is the roadmap defined? How do we handle intake requests? Is the roadmap of the next year created? Do we have a 3YP (3 year plan, a common document inside Amazon)
What are the distribution of roles in the org?
- Find about
  - How many Senior/Principal engineers can you get access to (and find if there’s room for your promotion to one of these roles)
  - Are there contractors or only full time employees?
  - Is your team experienced or a lot of new faces and fast growth? (Having new faces means you all start with same opportunity. Otherwise you won’t get ahead with a promotion faster than someone working for it in the same team for multiple years)

Dev

Are there engineering groups to join? (Design review group, postmortem bar-raiser groups…)
- I emphasized this one because I am really interested on it. I was part of a design review group in my previous org and I have socialized with a lot of people the same question. This has increased my network of interested people on having this group.
Tech stack: Languages, tooling, cloud provider…
- Follow-up: I’m not very experienced on X, what would be a good way of learning? Are there internal resources for it?
Are there examples of design docs and talks? (For external candidates they’ll refer to the company blog, for internal you may get the real designs)

Working conditions