Questions to Ask Your Potential Colleagues During a Peer Interview
Questions for the interview where you meet the people you would sit beside: how the team communicates, who you go to when stuck, what happens after a costly mistake, how credit gets shared, and how the team decides what not to take on.
The questions
Open any question for the note
How did you end up on this team?
Why ask it
Internal transfer, outside hire, or moved here in a reorganisation. A team built mostly from internal moves usually has a decent reputation inside the company. A team made entirely of recent external hires was probably rebuilt after something went wrong.
What is this team good at that you would not know from the outside?
Why ask it
An easy question to answer, which is why it works early, and the specific claim they choose, code review, handling incidents, writing things down, can be checked against everything else you hear that day.
How do you actually communicate day to day: chat, calls, documents?
Why ask it
This is about medium rather than sentiment. A team that lives in chat and a team that writes documents run at different tempos, and a mismatch with your own habits is the kind of thing that quietly exhausts people over months.
How much of the work is done together, and how much on your own?
Why ask it
Ask for a rough split. Someone who needs long uninterrupted stretches will struggle on a team that pairs most of the day, and someone who thinks out loud will be lonely on a team that works in silence.
Who do you go to when you are stuck?
Why ask it
The answer is frequently one overloaded person. If the same name comes up for every kind of problem, the team has a single point of failure, and you will be queueing behind everyone else for help in your first month.
What are the standing meetings, and how long is each one?
Why ask it
Ask for the list with days and durations rather than an impression. It is the most reliable single account of a working week you can get from an interview, and it usually surprises the person answering.
What happens here when someone says they do not understand something?
Why ask it
You are finding out whether questions are cheap. On teams where admitting confusion carries a cost, people guess quietly instead of asking, which is slower and far more expensive than anyone involved tends to notice.
What happened the last time a mistake cost the team real time?
Why ask it
You want a story that ends in a change: a check added, a step removed, a document written. Stories that end with a named individual describe a team that will eventually find a reason to blame you.
When something goes well, who tends to get the credit?
Why ask it
Listen for the names in the success story. If the manager appears in every good outcome and never in a bad one, you have learned exactly how this team is described to the rest of the company.
How do people on the team give each other feedback, if they do?
Why ask it
Plenty of teams have no peer feedback at all and will admit it when asked this directly. That is workable if you know now, because it means you will have to go and ask for it rather than wait to receive it.
Which other department do you work with most, and which relationship is hardest?
Why ask it
Naming the hardest one is the point of the question. If the difficult group is one you would deal with weekly, their friction becomes a permanent part of your job rather than an occasional annoyance.
Who has been here longest, and what do they know that is not written down anywhere?
Why ask it
This locates the undocumented knowledge. If nobody has been on the team longer than about eighteen months, expect to spend a chunk of your first year reconstructing decisions that nobody left an explanation for.
How do the remote and in-office people actually work together?
Why ask it
Ask about practice, not policy. Meetings with half the room on a screen behave differently from meetings without, and whether this team has solved it is usually obvious from how quickly and specifically they answer.
How does the team decide what not to do?
Why ask it
Teams without a way of refusing work accept everything and then deliver everything late. Look for a mechanism someone can describe, a defended roadmap, a manager who pushes back, rather than an assurance about prioritising carefully.
Does everyone get heard in meetings? How do you know?
Why ask it
The second half is what makes the question work. General reassurance is easy. A concrete practice, written proposals circulated before discussion, going round the room deliberately, is not, and only one of those answers is evidence.
What was the last time you disagreed with the manager, and what happened?
Why ask it
Whether they can produce any example at all is the real answer. A long hesitation before a small, safe story tells you more about how much dissent this team can absorb than the story itself does.
Was there a genuinely hard stretch in the past year? What made it hard?
Why ask it
Every team has had one. The honest version shows you what happens under strain: whether people covered for each other, whether anyone stepped in, or whether everyone went quiet and worked longer alone.
What do new people usually get wrong in their first month?
Why ask it
Practical and freely given. You get warned about the unwritten rule, the system that looks optional and is not, and the person who should have been consulted, before any of it costs you standing on the team.
What would make you leave?
Why ask it
A more honest route to the team's problems than asking about problems. People will name the condition that would break the deal for them, and it is often something already half present in what they have described.
If I join, what should I do in my first week?
Why ask it
A specific answer means they have pictured you actually being there, which suggests they want a colleague rather than another pair of hands. It also hands you a plan for a week that is otherwise mostly guesswork.
Making a peer interview count
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Sequence the conversation
- 1Open with something they can answer happily: how they joined, what the team does well. It sets the register and buys you goodwill for the harder questions.
- 2Move to mechanics next: meetings, how work arrives, who to ask when stuck. These feel neutral and produce the most usable detail.
- 3Save the two questions that could change your mind, mistakes, disagreement with the manager, what would make them leave, for the last ten minutes, once the conversation has warmed up.
- 4Close by asking what they would do in week one. It ends on a collaborative note and leaves them thinking of you as a colleague.
If you meet several peers
- Ask two identical questions of everyone. Where the answers diverge is where the truth about the team lives.
- Vary the rest, so you cover more ground and nobody feels handed a script.
- Note which topics people avoid rather than only what they say. A subject that three people step around is a real subject.
- Ask a later interviewer about something an earlier one mentioned. It shows you were listening and often produces a fuller version of the story.
Leave these for someone else
- Salary bands and equity. Peers usually do not know, and asking puts them in an awkward position they will remember.
- Whether you are getting the offer, or how you compare with other candidates. They are often not allowed to say, and it makes the rest of the conversation strained.
- Anything that invites gossip about a named person. Even if they take the bait, you have shown them what you would be like on the team.
- Complaints about your current employer. This is the room where that costs you most, because peers are asked whether they want to work with you.
Afterwards
Write it down within the hour
Record the exact phrases and the hesitations while you still have them. Within a week, three conversations will have collapsed into one vague feeling about the place, and vague feelings are not something you can weigh against an offer.
Compare peers against the manager
Where the two accounts differ, the peers are usually describing the present and the manager the intention. Both are real; only one of them is what your first six months will feel like.
Follow up on the specific thing
If you send a note, refer to something particular they said rather than thanking them for their time. It is the difference between a message that is read and one that is filed.