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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

#191

Post by znpy »

mfoy_ wrote: post #151
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! That was my experience. New product direction; needed some designers. Show up, and everybody is working on firefighting old bugs with a fake Agile approach. The kind where the manager hands out tickets to folks and the only metric is how many trivial bugs have been closed this week. Every time I spent any time looking into the code (million lines of crap) to see if anything could be done, I'd get widely criticiz…

I love fake-Agile, it's such a hilarious concept.

FRAgile

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#193

Post by wikibob »

snegu wrote: post #159
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! That was my experience. New product direction; needed some designers. Show up, and everybody is working on firefighting old bugs with a fake Agile approach. The kind where the manager hands out tickets to folks and the only metric is how many trivial bugs have been closed this week. Every time I spent any time looking into the code (million lines of crap) to see if anything could be done, I'd get widely criticiz…

Are you working on my project? I'm trying to get out, but not having much luck. I wonder if recruiters are turned off by the fact that I'm looking for another job again after just a few months.

What city are you in?

Across the major markets in the USA and Europe I’ve never seen a hotter market. If you aren’t getting responses I would ask someone for help with how you are marketing yourself.

Post your LinkedIn profile if you’d like

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#194

Post by everdrive »

acollins1331 wrote: post #7

Interviewing 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…

Your advice is correct, but depressing. These body-language games people play with each other are manipulative, and sometimes deceptive. Even if there's truth behind the assertion of confidence, the assertion was made to manipulate the outcome.

No doubt, the most obvious rebuttal is that the interviewer will be doing their best to manipulate no matter your tactic, so you either circumvent them or acquiesce to them.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#195

Post by lkschubert8 »

ed312 wrote: post #121
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…

You generally have to offer the same benefits to everyone in a company (at least in MA). The easiest way to do that is to offer "PTO" as a bucket to everyone. The new "cool" way to do it is to have "unlimited PTO" ... which I have pretty mixed feelings about.

I work for a place that has "unlimited PTO" and must say I'm not a fan. You have employees like me who fear taking off too much getting yelled at by HR to take more time off (but how much more??). And on the flipside the higher ups make snide remarks about people who take 20+ days off. From my understanding unlimited is code for in the high teens.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#196

Post by sgustard »

jbob2000 wrote: post #88
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).

What if as a condition to accept a job offer you request a meeting with the CEO? Would the company refuse or do they value you enough to make it happen?

I have never taken a job without talking to a top executive. You get a view of the company bigger than your team, you get to ask those business questions your manager may not know, and you have a head start on making good connections with upper management.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#197

Post by growlist »

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.

I don't think I'm alone in having to switch between multiple machine configs from day to day. The only way I could avoid using VMs would be to physically swap hard drives, at which point why not just work in VMs...

As long as one has admin access in the VM of course!

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#198

Post by scarface74 »

toast0 wrote: post #184
scarface74 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple. For nice round numbers. Say you’re making $140K (above the social security maximum to make the calculations slightly simpler). A 5% match is $7000. But since it is an untaxed employee benefit and if I think I can already max out my 401K plan, I would have to take into account the 24% Federal 6% state (GA), and 1.4% Medicare tax - 31.4% That means I would need to negotiate at least 7000/.686 = $10,204 extra.

Employer contributions are tax deferred, not untaxed. Assuming you don't trigger penalties, you'll pay ordinary income on that down the line. I wouldn't expect to retire into a 0% tax bracket, especially if you're maxing the employee contribution.

Many companies offer Roth as an option for a 401K and will put your match into it. So they would be completely untaxed.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#199

Post by toast0 »

dominotw wrote: post #17
a3n wrote: post #3

Why doesn't the interviewee ever ask the interviewer a whiteboard or puzzle question, "to see how you think?"

Because unless you are some sort of celebrity engineer, "interview is a conversation between both parties" is nonsense. Company is interviewing the candidate not the other way around, no matter what we like to think. Edit: Sorry I should've clarified. I am specially referring to companies that don't really have to care about your feelings towards their interviews. FAANGs for example. They simply don't care and there…

As an occasional interviewee and mostly an interviewer, I would agree that the company has the leverage. However, the interviewee should be using the interview to find out what they need to know, to the extent that's possible.

Is tooling important to you? Ask about that. Do you want to push to prod like a cowboy, or does that repulse you? Ask about that. Whatever frustrates you about your current job, you can try to find out before you take a job where it's worse.

Framing those questions to get usable answers is a skill, of course, but if you've got a few areas to ask for, you can use lists like these to find different ways to ask. Just like interviewing, asking leading questions gets you 'right' answers that don't tell you what you want to know, so you want to get the interviewer to go off script and probably be truthful.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#200

Post by alistairSH »

noarchy wrote: post #180
alistairSH wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask their own whiteboard question? That would be strange, as I'm a manager and don't write much code these days. But, if I ask a whiteboard question (or any tech question), asking me related questions as a means to further the discussion would be a good signal.

>Ask their own whiteboard question? That would be strange, as I'm a manager and don't write much code these days. I don't write much code on a whiteboard, so that makes two of us. But I agree that having a discussion about such problems can be productive. It may help separate legitimate problem-solving from mere hazing.

FWIW, I make a white-board available, but don't require it's use. I'm not looking for syntactically correct code. I want to know how a candidate would approach a problem. If that involves them drawing or writing pseudo-code, that's fine with me. If they can talk through the questions without the board, that's fine too.
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