> Is there a support / marketing / other call-heavy team close to my new team? What does that mean?
"will i be listening to people answering the phone all day, every day?"
Questions to ask a company during a job interview
51–60 of 467 posts
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#52Why doesn't the interviewee ever ask the interviewer a whiteboard or puzzle question, "to see how you think?"
During the last interview, I've had similar thing happen to me -- after we discussed whiteboard design question, the candidate asked, "how would you solve this?". This resulted in a pretty nice exchange of opinions.
In a somewhat related point, last time I was designing the coding question, I tested it on my teammmates. They all solved it, and their response was very helpful, and it allowed me to clarify some points in the problem.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#53For early startups, these are important: - Are you profitable - If not, how long is your runway
I did that. Turns out, things change fast. (Or the answer was not truthful? I don't know.)
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#54Interviewing the interviewer has been THE best way to get the job. It just oozes a confidence that you already know you're good enough to get the job, and you're trying to figure out if they are good enough for YOU. Figure out questions before hand that describe the type of good working environments or fixes for bad ones that you've had in the past. The interviewer will quickly shift and try to sell the position to y…
As a freelancer (SRE/devops/'cloud native' architecture etc), this is what I do. Not all questions in original article apply to me though, but I get quite a few offers, and I only try to accept interesting-ones.
In my experience, when interviewers don't switch to selling the position, this is a bad sign. I'm confident I know my job, am open and honest about what I know and don't know, I don't need a 101 quiz of whatever tech they have in mind. If this happens I usually cut the interview short and just tell them this is probably not a good match.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#55One I am going to start to ask is "Are all developers allowed to have local admin access of their computers?" I've struggled against this in my last 3 positions. This is a dealbreaker for me, and should be for all developers.
From an infosec professional perspective, this one is always a challenge for security sensitive places. I agree with you that developers need admin rights on their development machines, but I have witnessed first hand why many companies attempt to take away local admin rights. When I'm responding to security alerts where developers have downloaded random .dll files from the internet, or some "troubleshooting utility"…
Both excellent points.
Maybe the better question is: how do you prevent your lowest-bidder corporate antivirus marks from marking git-bash as malware, stopping all work for the team for two days?
Developers don’t need admin access, they need ways of getting their jobs done with the best available tools. That’s a damn difficult balance to find!
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#56One I am going to start to ask is "Are all developers allowed to have local admin access of their computers?" I've struggled against this in my last 3 positions. This is a dealbreaker for me, and should be for all developers.
From an infosec professional perspective, this one is always a challenge for security sensitive places. I agree with you that developers need admin rights on their development machines, but I have witnessed first hand why many companies attempt to take away local admin rights. When I'm responding to security alerts where developers have downloaded random .dll files from the internet, or some "troubleshooting utility"…
Or one could provide a package manager that allows user installs of software, like Nix. (Depending on the threat model, of course.)
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#57I am now a Mr Manager Person, so I have a different but related set of questions:
1. What is the demographic breakdown of the engineering team? And, what does the company affirmatively do to foster diversity?
2. What resources do the founders have available — investors, board, mentors, for instance — to help them as the company grows?
3. What is the near term vision for the company? 1yr/5yr?
4. What resources are available for professional development for managers/directors?
5. At $CURRENT_COMPANY, the company is serious about reviews upwards — as a manager, my direct reports are consulted in a formal process at review time. Is there a similar process at $POTENTIAL_EMPLOYER?
6. What is the cadence and process for reviews?
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
From an infosec professional perspective, this one is always a challenge for security sensitive places. I agree with you that developers need admin rights on their development machines, but I have witnessed first hand why many companies attempt to take away local admin rights. When I'm responding to security alerts where developers have downloaded random .dll files from the internet, or some "troubleshooting utility"…
i wonder if making the development machine use something similar to qubes ( https://www.qubes-os.org/ ) by default works. Also, if a compromised machine on the internal network destroys your company's security assumptions, then there must not have much defense in depth.
qubes-like solutions are great at preventing malicious code from accessing your internal websites, but pretty useless from "code leak" perspective.
If you have downloaded a trojaned "super library" and put it to your build process, it will, by definition, be in the same security domain as your source code.
Unless you audit all file accesses and outgoing internet access, you won't be able to prevent code exfiltration.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#59Why doesn't the interviewee ever ask the interviewer a whiteboard or puzzle question, "to see how you think?"
Because the coding ability of one employee is not a good reason for a candidate to refuse or accept an offer.
If that employee is doing the interviewing of someone who is being expected to write code then I would say it does indicate something about a company.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#60Why doesn't the interviewee ever ask the interviewer a whiteboard or puzzle question, "to see how you think?"
Because it's a poor source of information about experienced candidates, and more about cargo culting and/or hazing.
I suppose that briefly turning it around on the immediate interviewer could be constructive, with some people, but I doubt I could pull that off even half the time.
My impression, from HN comments and firsthand, is that people still doing it seem to be thinking one-sided about it (i.e., they want to assess and/or manipulate "the candidate", and they seem to assume it's implied that everyone at the company is good). They probably also think this is convention, and perhaps resent or are suspicious of anyone not complying.
Personally, rather than turning the tables with the hazing, which can come across as hostile or combative, my natural inclination is to have a candid and thoughtful discussion about it.
(Warning: I've had poor success with trying to discuss with people who want to do the leetcode/puzzle-style whiteboard coding hazing. Maybe partly because the conversation only has occasion to happen with people who are still doing it, so it's not a representative sample of the field. I also suspect that, when it's with the more HR/recruiter-type people (not engineers or managers), they tend to not be participating in the discussion in the same way I am, but instead are performing the right head nods, while focusing on their normal modes, such as looking for red flags in what "the candidate" says, formulating how they'll report this, and being careful what they say.)