Here are some questions that I recommend you ask when interviewing for the new Rails development position.

Business Questions

I recommend you ask these second if possible. This will make you look better.

1. Do you expect me to be the "Product Owner"?
   • If they expect you to be both the Product Owner and Developer then you are likely in for a world of hurt. Obviously this is dependent on company size and structure. As a developer you should never be the product owner unless the project is in early stages and you are working through the initial architecture.

Technical Questions

These questions will be seriously relevant to your desire to work with the companies existing infrastructure.

1. Do you use Object Oriented design patterns or Functional design patterns?
   • Strong preference to team that fully utilize Object Oriented design.

2. Do you use ActiveRecord or SQL only.

   • Strong preference to teams that understand how to fully utilize ActiveRecord before using SQL.

3. Do you use the standard Rails MVC structure or custom design patterns?

   • Strong preference given to teams that use the standard Rails setup as much as possible.

4. Does your team use tribal knowledge or concise documentation?

   • Strong preference given to teams that have concise documentation

5. Does your team use accepts_nested_attributes_for?

   • Very strong prefenence given to accepts_nested_attributes usage

6. Does your team use Form objects? Do you use accepts_nested_attributes_for

   • Strong preference to teams that know how to use accepts_nested_attributes_for

7. How restrictive or loose is your current Rubocop setup? How many violations do you currently have?

   • Strong preference to teams with 0 violations. Preference to teams with loose setups.

8. How many external services are you using? 1 or many?

   • Preference should be given to teams that know how to keep their external service usage to a minimum.

9. Do you use Ransack for searching?

   • Strong preference to teams that do not use Ransack. If they use it for more than legacy code support, then it suggests that the team isn't very experienced at replacing existing code. If you need simple and intuitive Rails searching use something else. My Recommendation: search_cop

10. Do you use JSON in the database? or manual conversion after load?

    • Strong preference to teams that use manual conversions as they likely understand caching, etc. The main problem with JSON columns is when you start performing SQL actions on them. Then things get super complicated and not-fun.

Happy Interviewing!