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The big one for me: how strongly do you equate "programming" with "engineering", and to what extent do you value other approaches (in the spirit of [1])?

To what extent are ways of working circumscribed by tooling choices?

"What are you selling?" (and is it something I can believe in) is pretty important too.

[1] https://www.tedinski.com/2018/03/20/wizarding-vs-engineering...

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Parts of that article are a bit dubious. Good practices don't have much to do with a language being statically typed or dynamically typed. You can write awful, convoluted code with a wizardry approach in Java and C++, but clean, easily maintainable and testable code with an engineering approach in Elixir and Clojure, which indeed would be much harder in Python. The programming paradigm (and a lot of other factors) is probably much more important than static vs. dynamic.

You have to assume going in that unknown startup code will be a shitshow.

Given the choice between a unityped shitshow and a shitshow where I can at least lean on the compiler, I know which one I'll pick every time.

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