The best way to find out about work/life balance in your next engineering interview.

Are you a developer who is looking for work/life balance in your next job? The good news is that there are a lot of tech companies who value work/life balance, but figuring out how they define that balance can be tricky.

Plus, you've only got time to ask a few questions in your interview, so you have to make sure they count. Luckily, I've put together the perfect set of questions for you to ask, so you can look great during your interview and get the information you need.

How responsive are people to emails/Slack over the weekends and after 6pm?
Don't ask: Is there work/life balance here? Yes-or-no questions like this one only get you canned responses. Plus, some interviewers will interpret this to mean that you’re unwilling to work hard. Everyone, regardless of how many hours they themselves work each week, wants to have teammates who pull their weight and care about the team more than (or at least as much as) they do.

Remember, phrasing matters. If you ask a question like this one, you’ll learn what the working schedule is like, what the expectations are, and how team members communicate with one another.

This question will shed light on:
- Open Communication
- Work/Life Balance
What is the on-call schedule like here?
While this might sound like a simple question, it reveals a lot about a company’s maturity, and how thoughtfully they consider and protect work/life balance.

You might learn that their application goes down in the middle night rather frequently, which you should certainly ask more questions about. Hopefully, they’ll tell you about an on-call schedule that they’ve designed to be both fair and efficient, and then volunteer information about how long rotations are, if there are established priority levels of incidents, and whether this is a clear alerting process that identifies what went wrong.

This question will shed light on:
- High Quality Code Base
- Work/Life Balance
What's the typical day, week, and weekend like in the life of an engineer here?
No matter how the interviewer answers, you should be able to gauge what the expectations are around what time you show up, what time you leave, whether you’re able to work from home, and whether working weekends is common. It’s a question that you can ask multiple interviewers and see how much variance there is between different members of the team, and whether the perception managers have is in line with the reality of their team members.

This question will shed light on:
- Work/Life Balance
Are there times of the month, quarter, or year when the team is most busy?
You want to know if schedules change at different times of the year, and if there are “crunch times,” how often they occur. For example, companies in travel and retail ramp up for the holidays, education technology companies follow the academic calendar, and companies in the payday loan space often follow a first-of-the-month cadence.

Whatever it is, you should know what to expect in terms of pace of work, how it varies throughout the year, and whether the team tries to maintain a steady pace or just “rides the wave.” You can then ask about what the expectations are given these peak times. Will you be able to work remotely during Christmas time even though it’s the biggest time of the year for the company?

This question will shed light on:
- Flexible Work Arrangements
- Work/Life Balance
How does this team plan projects and create deadline estimates?
The real question you want to ask is: What happens when your team costs incorrectly? Instead of asking this right off the bat though, let your interviewer first paint a picture of how deadlines are even decided upon. Does the team tend to set ambitious goals and then rally together to meet them, or do they err on the side of overestimating delivery?

People complain about both extremes. On one hand, it can feel frantic and stressful to be constantly delivering on aggressive deadlines, but on the other side, it can be frustrating to work on a team that doesn’t seem to be pushing themselves to move projects forward. Decide what’s right for you at this time in your life, and find a team that wants to move at the same pace as you.

This question will shed light on:
- Work/Life Balance
- Fast-Paced Environment
- Risk-Taking > Stability
Do certain projects require more face-to-face time than others?
“What is the general working dynamic here?”

This is an A+ question because it’s an invitation for your interviewer to talk about multiple topics that you care about. Maybe the team is really flexible about when and where people work. Maybe some people start their day at 8am and others come into the office right before lunch. Maybe everyone is expected to attend an in-person stand-up meeting every morning at 10am. Perhaps the company is big on pairing, and the majority of people pair virtually.

Finally, it’s possible that working practices vary from project to project, and the team is like a chameleon, adapting to the schedules of their clients or the other teams they collaborate with at the company. It’s one question that can yield so many answers.

This question will shed light on:
- Flexible Work Arrangements
- Pair Programs
- Cross-Department Collaboration
- Work/Life Balance