it's insufficient to know the questions. to gauge whether a company is the right fit, you must understand what it is that you're looking for. this is a culmination of past experiences and lessons learned. the questions will follow.
Questions to ask a company during a job interview
351–360 of 467 posts
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#352In my experience it's important to not ask "easy" questions that can be answered by a simple yes/no. Instead of: Are you friendly to remote work? Ask: Will I be working with anyone who is remote, or who works from home on a regular basis? Instead of: Is the work life balance good? Ask: How responsive are people to emails/Slack over the weekends and after 6pm? Instead of: Can I have a good career path? Ask: Did any of…
I disagree with the career path question. Rising within the company does not necessarily mean that the same skills are effective at other companies.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I joined a team that does agile software development. Apparently that meant that occasionally a slack bot asks me what I did recently.
I did work with one team that managed to make a compromise around status reports. If the team could commit to updating their stories at the end of the day, then we could cut 15 minutes out of standup by leaving out what we did and just talking about blockers and what we learned. There's supposed to be some osmosis around hearing what everyone else is working on. But practically if you split into separate scrums, you'…
Scrum has a limit on team size, for this very reason and a few others.
I tried running a scrum of 12 and indeed it was clear from the first standup that it wouldn't fly.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
hahaha I love it because its true, but you do assume that your manager reads the answers right? One thing I didn't notice for a few quarters was that the slack bot was not automatically configured to show the other people in the standup what was written. This is very important to the standup concept so you can discuss and help others on a task if it seems relevant, and everyone is aware.
I think he does read it. Not sure how "agile" it all is but it isn't the worst system as in it isn't as disruptive as everyone chatting all the time.
If you're reporting what you did to your manager instead of to the team, it's not agile.
It's probably some measure of micromanagement going on. Don't buy it if you know what's good for you.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the nice thing about the "tell me about a time when..."-style questions is that it makes it harder to lie, or at least harder top lie believably. None of the interviewers will bat an eyelid answering "do you value developer growth" with a one-word lie "yes," but I think most interviewers would feel uncomfortable making up a story whole-cloth, and that would show. The risk, of course, is that you'll seem rude…
Yes. I love the table-turning style of these questions; but the fact is, they can always answer "No, we can't think of any such examples. Are you going to walk away from the job?" That is to say, hiring is usually a buyer's market.
We spent all spring trying to hire two engineers. It's not a buyer's market right now, at least not in my town.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#356One 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.
Are all developers allowed to have local admin access of their computers? These are the same devs who install random things with curl|sudo bash right? Or write code that can only run as root in production? No thanks. These days of virtualenvs and similar, only incompetent devs insist on being root too. In fact, this will make an excellent interview question, thanks!
I think if I got this answer during an interview, as a candidate, I would be pleased that your criteria reject me as an incompetent dev.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#357One 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.
Are all developers allowed to have local admin access of their computers? These are the same devs who install random things with curl|sudo bash right? Or write code that can only run as root in production? No thanks. These days of virtualenvs and similar, only incompetent devs insist on being root too. In fact, this will make an excellent interview question, thanks!
When you're not allowed to install applications and tools to your own, that gets in the way of productivity and happiness at work.
I've worked at companies where even being able to install something simple like Notepad++ or VSCode was turned into a major chore or made impossible thanks to the locked down environment.
Locking down trivially important system preferences like your desktop background is another example of just plain annoying management that I've witnessed.
Don't forget corporate network content blocking, and I don't mean the obviously not safe for work content, but companies acting as the productivity police e.g. blocking Twitter and YouTube just because they don't trust you enough to not slack off at work, and furthermore not trusting your supervisor to be competent enough to determine whether or not you've been productive enough lately.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asking these questions a lot in interviews to candidates most people lie by either talking in generalities, or back off and are honest like "were going through that now" both give you an answer. I have not asked this directly in an interview but my normal tactic is to have lunch with the engineers and no manager which gets you lots of examples.
How do you get to have lunch with the engineers before joining the company?
We often (twice in the past 3-4 months) sent desirable prospective hires for coffee with a current employee to allay some of their fears. Both accepted jobs shortly after this, and likey would not have if we didn't give them relatively "unfettered" access to the real deal.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
friend of mine joined a company that in theory checked all the boxes, in practice, none. Extreme case but ...
It's happened to me twice now. I'm loving the ideas in this thread about asking the, "tell me about a time when ..." style questions because I've always delved deep into the culture and values philosophy, and have found that so far each company was describing their aspirational ideal, which did not reflect practice at all.
As an engineering manager I try to answer truthfully to these probing questions because (1) If someone quits after being hired under false pretenses it's more work for me, (2) I'm relatively new to the position so naive/earnest enough to speak the truth (I was a developer too!)
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or worse, interviews and hiring are with group A and the organization has you now working with group B. Obviously A knows little about B. This happens at FAAMG companies.
M doesn’t really do that for anyone but new grad hires. I’m not sure either A does that either (the A closest to M doesn’t, I know from personal experience). F and G definitely do, they are notorious for it.
Apple is notorious for it. In some groups, your title/manager often have little to do with what you actually work on. "secret projects" are de-rigeur.