Are software engineers ready for their interviews?

Imagine that you received an email from the HR department for the job that you applied last week, informing you that they liked your CV and that they would like to arrange a technical interview. You are excited and you agree to meet a technical guy the next day. So here you are, inside an office starting answering all that kind of questions that this technical guy has for you. After finishing this step he says "Would you like to ask anything?". Now it's your time!!! You start thinking of asking something cool! Maybe you can ask to see some code in order to check their style of coding. Or maybe you will ask more info about the processes that they follow. Or what type of tests they do. Or if they use TDD and agile methodologies.Or ask him if the follow the git flow. Or if the food in the restaurant is good. How about asking all of them? You think that you will have the time for asking all of these? And that your interviewer will answer in details all of these? And I think that by asking all of these you might make your interviewer tired rather than excited.

Now you are leaving the office and you are entering the car and you have to think if this job is what you have dreamed. Ok you may have seen some code but by seeing 5-10 classes can you really guarantee about the quality of code? And about the processes how sure you are that they keep them in their every day activities? And what about tests? Is it enough to know that they do a TDD? Do they use a code coverage tool? What about mutation test? Ah, I wish I have asked all these thinks before!

Well in my opinion even if you have asked more questions you still can not be sure that the answers include the whole reality and that they can give you the whole picture of your future job. Now I would like to change the question of your interviewer a little bit. How about the question "If you only one had one thing to ask, what it would be?". Think about it. Only one thing. Only one.

For me the answer should be only one. "I would like to see the SwAD (software architecture document) and SRS (Software Requirements Specification) documents". That's it. All the info I need is there and all the culture of the company and the team is there. First of all if they have that kind of documents, you can be sure that they are well organized. You can easily understand the technologies that they are using. You can get the whole picture of the product/project that you are going to work. You can see the QA level that they want and how they deal with it. You can have immediately an opinion for the architect. The head of your working team. Does he likes to search for new technologies/solutions or he steaks with old ones? Does he cares about the performance/scalability? If he does then the development team does too for sure. From these documents you can see how often they update them and if there is also a review process. Often updates means high demand of features and of course only a good team and an experienced one can support such amount of updates. And of course if they review this document then for sure they have a review process for the code too.

Finally you can get a lot of more information from these two documents but the most important thing is that these two documents actually PROVE how your every day work will look like and they PROVE how well organized is this team. The only problem may be the denial of them to show you these documents as they may be classified but again I think that all the companies should at least have some part of these documents available for these purposes as these documents are actually their IDENTITY.