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"How do you feel about Friday afternoon deploys?" is a great question for that. Many interviewers assume you want to hear about how they refuse to do them in order to protect your Friday night and weekend time. Really, the answer you want is that they've automated the deploy process and made it robust enough not to break production so it doesn't matter when a deploy happens.

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Automated deploys aren't a magic bullet and can still break production, even at a big megacorp with tons of infra and tests to keep prod safe.

Of course not, but the process of automating deploys (or anything really) makes you think through what can go wrong, and ways to mitigate problems, and put tests in place to make sure things worked, and add metrics, and test your rollback procedure, and so on. A company that doesn't have automated deploys is much more likely to have manual processes for more things than just deployment.

It's not a magic bullet, but in my experience it's a very good indicator of how a company approaches an obvious problem, so you can get a really clear signal about whether or not you'd enjoy working there.

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