> The reality is that the market for good developers is so competitive that they could just walk out and find 10 other places with better answers to these quest

> The reality is that the market for good developers is so competitive that they could just walk out and find 10 other places with better answers to these questions. Sure, but will that be a better place to work? Ultimately there are many failure modes for software engineering teams, and grilling the interviewer with a series of highly-specific workflow questions is not likely to yield much insight. If the team is really as dysfunctional as the author fears, then you're not likely to get an answer that is on the same wavelength as you anyway. You're better off asking things a little higher level and a little more open-ended and then reading between the lines. So for example, instead of: > Does this team or any of the related teams have a person who actively rejects proposals to improve the code base? You could ask: > What are the biggest problems in the code base currently? You can then engage in a dialogue and probe into details organically. This will yield much more fruit than asking a question to which the obvious answer is "no, of course not".