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.
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?
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?
Markup:
- HTML5 or XHTML Strict?
- Semantics Nazi 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?
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)
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?
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?
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)
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?"