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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

#221

Post by organsnyder »

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.

We called it "agilescrumfall" at my previous job.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#222

Post by BurningFrog »

jcadam wrote: post #99

Problem: Interviewers lie. I once interviewed with a company that brought me into a new, shiny, well-appointed building on the corporate campus for an interview. I did well answering their questions. And they answered my usual questions correctly. Stuff like "Can developers here choose their own tools?" and "My title is going to be Lead Engineer, will I actually be a Lead Engineer?" After I was hired, I found out eve…

Recruiters will possibly say anything to get a sale.

But when talking to your future peers/team mates, I think you can expect a lot of honesty if you ask the right questions about how things really are.

I know I'm always 100% honest, because if they get hired, we'll be coworkers, and they'll know if I lied!!

PS It's weird that you didn't get the title in the contract

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#223

Post by scarface74 »

toast0 wrote: post #201
scarface74 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can put the employee contribution into Roth, but the employer contribution is almost certainly going into traditional; I don't believe there is a provision for employer match into Roth. (Working on the link) https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/retirement-plans-faqs-o...

Today I Learned.....

And if I had kept reading the link I found (but didn't post)

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/102714/are-roth-401...

Unlike the employee's contribution, however, the employer's contribution is placed into a traditional 401(k) plan, and it is taxable upon withdrawal. The employee's into a Roth 401(k). Therefore, many employers have found the additional administrative demands of offering the Roth 401(k) outweigh the benefits to their employees and do not often offer one. This is the reason for the perception, or misconception, that employers cannot provide a match to Roth 401(k) employee contributions, when in reality, they are simply not providing the option for the plan at all due to the administrative hassle.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#224

Post by theflyinghorse »

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"…

This just irks me the wrong way.

What problem are you solving by making work for devs range from "incredibly hard" to "outright impossible" via taking admin privileges away? Surely you must understand that all things should be in balance, that security isn't the sole goal of an organization but rather an important consideration in the overall structure.

Are you attempting to create a tech "solution" to a hiring problem? You aren't going to succeed.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#225

Post by dinsjg3434 »

weliketocode wrote: post #147

The phrase 'hiring is broken' seems to have become synonymous with companies improperly judging candidates. BUT! This problem pales in comparison to the difficulty involved for candidates trying to judge companies. Now, I won't go as far as some of the other posters here and point to rampant deceit. However, interviewers will generally try to be positive, and it's very difficult for an interviewer to say "don't work…

See the point is sometimes you need to choose between

1. Ape Shit company . 2 Stinking Bat shit company 3 Piles of Horseshit company

;-) Sometimes people make choices out of necessity. To escape your worst nightmare bozo boss to get a short term reprieve.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#226

Post by amptorn »

reallydontask wrote: post #69

> Is there a support / marketing / other call-heavy team close to my new team? This is so important. I can probably live with most open plan set ups, sure there will be annoying times, but if there is a call-heavy team nearby, forget it. I refuse to wear noise cancelling headphones all day long. FWIW, interviewers will blatantly lie. I asked at an interview about equipment quality and was told that they'd not heard a…

Yeah, the correct phrasing of that question is "Show me the place where I'll be working." They should be able to lead you down the corridor and show you potential future co-workers at work.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#227

Post by pm215 »

theamk wrote: post #46
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…

At my job, we have "do you have any questions for us" part as a standard part of every interview -- and my experience shows that most people always have at least one question.

I suspect most candidates have at least one question because it's pretty widely known that many employers will ask "do you have any questions for us" at the end of an interview, and so will have prepared something that makes them sound interested in the employer in some way, even if they don't necessarily actually care that much about the answer. (For instance the advice on https://www.wikijob.co.uk/content/interview-advice/interview... suggests "Have two or three interesting and intelligent questions prepared before the interview, to show that you are interested in the job and eager to find out more" etc.)

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#228

Post by metalgearsolid »

jcadam wrote: post #99

Problem: Interviewers lie. I once interviewed with a company that brought me into a new, shiny, well-appointed building on the corporate campus for an interview. I did well answering their questions. And they answered my usual questions correctly. Stuff like "Can developers here choose their own tools?" and "My title is going to be Lead Engineer, will I actually be a Lead Engineer?" After I was hired, I found out eve…

I came in here to basically say that all these questions are great, but being able to just simply walk around the office and its departments (if it's that big) is also really important. You got bamboozled to a pretty extreme extent, but at least I know from my last employer that I'll be making damn sure that my future software development team isn't using older, slower computers than the marketing department.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#229

Post by Diederich »

baddash wrote: post #146
Diederich wrote: post #108

I've been interviewing with Google since 2006 or so, off and on, though I've never accepted an offer from them. I do this because I always learn several things from the rigorous on-site interviews, it's a lot of fun, and the machine that runs the process seems to not mind being turned down in the past. Back in the beginning of that time period, I used to ask (fairly jokingly) the same question: "How many servers do y…

What were the responses by Google to those three questions?

Of course, Google didn't answer my questions, people who were working at Google at the time did. (:

As to the specific responses, I'd have to check my old notes, which I don't have handy at the moment. For "tier 1" companies, such as Google, common responses to "What brought you here" and "Why do you stay" are excellent comp, being able to work with many very talented people, and the ability to move around in the org.

I've found the "what keeps you up at night" question has the most diverse responses.

In general, I've been pretty surprised at the amount of apparent honesty I get. It's hard to verify the responses, of course, but any time I get a response that's not completely positive or 'canned' in some way, it seems pretty legit.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#230

Post by EnderWT »

I'll give a shoutout to https://www.keyvalues.com/culture-queries where questions like these are explained in more depth, for example:

Can you give me an example of a mistake you've made here, and how it was handled?

Ideally, your interviewer will answer honestly. If people are comfortable discussing big failures, it suggests that the company has created a safe environment for people to fail, and signals that it’s an environment conducive to taking risks and experimenting.

On the other hand, if people are guarded when it comes to discussing failures, they might be working in a culture of blame.

You can follow up by asking about their practices around investigating issues, writing post-mortems, and overall documentation.

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