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Questions to ask a company during a job interview

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Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#81

Post by viraptor »

mttyng wrote: post #72
viraptor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been in a position where I've not been paid for each call out. (And only one place which didn't pay for standby)

Whoa. That gives me pause. It makes absolute sense, but it never occurred to me.

I'm lucky though. I see recurring conversations about it on /r/devops and I'm aware not everyone is in the same situation. Some even wear it as a badge of honour that they improve reliability so they shouldn't be paid for things breaking. (Which I completely disagree with) But working after hours is working after hours - if it doesn't feel right, maybe you should have a conversation about it.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#82

Post by iamthepieman »

jrjarrett wrote: post #65

How much annual / personal / sick / parental / unpaid leave is available? This is a great question; when I have searched for jobs, it's one of the more important benefits to me. Sadly, however, I've found most places have gone to "PTO" -- combining time off for illness and vacation into one bank -- how have others successfully negotiated an appropriate level of time off? (Context: For a very long time, I worked for c…

I just tell them how much time off I'll need during salary negotiations. I know you offer two weeks PTO and 3 weeks after 5 year, 4 weeks after 10 years etc. But I'm not restarting my PTO every time I switch companies. So I will come in with PTO equal to my experience at a minimum.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#83

Post by bri3d »

mttyng wrote: post #72
viraptor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been in a position where I've not been paid for each call out. (And only one place which didn't pay for standby)

Whoa. That gives me pause. It makes absolute sense, but it never occurred to me.

When I have seen this done, the amount is often inconsequential in relation to the amount of effort to be on-call. I don't love this incentive structure because the cost of being on-call is somewhat fixed up front. Needing to avoid being out of page coverage / availability and having a computer available is a high cost paid by the employee regardless of actual page-out workload. Paying for standby certainly helps, but I haven't seen standby pay match well with the perceived effort. Maybe some companies do this right, but higher negotiated upfront pay has appeared more effective in my experience.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#85

Post by viraptor »

smashface wrote: post #50
wodenokoto wrote: post #45

> Is there a support / marketing / other call-heavy team close to my new team? What does that mean?

I assume the author meant that since those teams will be speaking a lot to people as part of their daily work they add a lot of ambient noise to a workplace. That could matter to some people in open office plans or cube farms where you can't separate yourself from that noise.

That's it. "Is the office loud" is subjective. "Is there a team handling calls a few metres away" has a simple objective answer... usually.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#86

Post by oe »

I created a short questionnaire with TypeForm that asks some of these questions and linked it to my LinkedIn profile. Now any recruiter either answers ten or so qualifying questions or skips the questionnaire and goes straight to trash for not even reading my profile.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#87

Post by opendomain »

viraptor wrote: post #32
sanj wrote: post #29

For many years I gave a talk titled "Questions Engineers Should Ask" This list is missing the two most important [busines] questions: 1. How do you make money? If you can't understand, or the interview can't explain, then I'd run away. This can also lead to interesting questions about risks, competitors, etc. 2. What's preventing you from making more money? The answer that you want to hear is engineering effort . If…

I'd love to include those questions with links to the talk if you can find it! (Like the siblings comment, I may disagree with "The answer that you want to hear is engineering effort", but the questions are definitely valid in some situations)

I would appreciate it as well.

Thank you!

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#88

Post by jbob2000 »

harimau777 wrote: post #63

A problem that I've had is that every company says that they value code quality, emphasize developer growth, value developer's technical feedback, etc. even if they don't in practice. I've debated taking a page from old school behavioral interviewing and asking questions like: Tell me about a time that you made a decision to improve code quality or architecture at the expense of a deadline. Tell me about a time that…

This only works if you're interviewing with decision makers. At a larger organization, I don't think the person you're interviewing with would have any capacity to answer these (which could be a red flag for you, but also a very limiting one).

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#89

Post by hvidgaard »

relax88 wrote: post #43
protonfish wrote: post #24

One 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"…

Developers can have local admin because it's expected that you can trust them. If they betray that thrust, then they lose that privilege, and depending on the nature of their work that might mean they cannot work. Bad for them, but surely it was written in their contract.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#90

Post by saint_abroad »

mttyng wrote: post #72
viraptor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been in a position where I've not been paid for each call out. (And only one place which didn't pay for standby)

Whoa. That gives me pause. It makes absolute sense, but it never occurred to me.

Where devops works is that there's shared call-out responsibility when things go wrong at 2am. It won't happen again because they'll take the time to fix things.

If management don't also share in the responsibility, it -might- will happen again because they won't allocate the time (and-a-half) to fix things.

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