371–380 of 467 posts
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FAANG, for Netflix. Microsoft does not matter.
Care to elaborate? Why does Microsoft not matter, but Amazon/Apple does?
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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.
What would you say is the distinction between influencing and manipulating an outcome?
- 1) You earnestly express a belief, and it happens to have the desired outcome.
- 2) You express a belief primarily because you know what outcome it will create.
- 3) And the grey area: You honestly hold a belief, but you're also well informed about how that belief must be presented to modify your outcome.
Realistically, most of us live in that third option. The distinction between a job interview, and say, a dinner out with a friend, is that you're highly incentivized during a job interview to present yourself in the best light possible. Most of us are aware of how we'll come off when we make a statement, and there's always some incentive to come off in a better light. But, a job interview generally removes the possibility for blunt honesty. "Well, of course I'm excited to work here. If I don't express that excitement, you won't hire me!" Such a frank appraisal isn't really possible in a job interview. But in another (ie, a social) context, you could make a sarcastic quip, or even just an honest appraisal of the situation. "I'm excited to see you, but being in this crowded restaurant is giving me a bit of a panic attack." Maybe that's not the best social tact, but the option is much more available in a social context.
I'm meandering a bit here, but I hope my point comes through. When we're stuck in that grey area of option #3 in most situations in every day life, we can generally chose to go with honesty if we prefer. In a job interview, our success and survival depends on forcing us toward option #2.
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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.
In the US, in the tech industry, right now? That's not even close to true.
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.
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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.
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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!
It's an interesting hygiene problem. Semi-related, I love UAC, and taking UAC seriously. It's the closest thing we have to "good handwashing habits" for admin access. I don't understand how many corporate GPO defaults/admin "standard images" I've seen where if someone has admin access at all they default to UAC off. (I make sure to turn it immediately back on as a matter of instilled corporate habit. One job I had to remember to do that after every restart/full relogin because of GPO overrides. Gross.) Sometimes I wonder if there is some oath I just could sign as a developer that starts with something like "I promise always to at least wash my hands / pay attention to UAC prompts" and "I swear I usually have good reasons to authorize admin access when I reply to a UAC prompt". (And/or you know, use the GPO for what it was meant to do and enforce a minimum UAC, rather than disable it.)
(I also find it peculiar how many Windows IT admins and developers I've met that disable UAC in a corporate environment but then personally use macOS and are so happy that is has SUDO prompts and wish Windows had something similar but somehow don't realize UAC is the exact same thing. It's a strange cognitive dissonance that I don't think I will ever understand. Yes, I've heard all the arguments that Vista's first usages of UAC confused them and they gave up learning it before it settled down and they didn't want to unlearn decades of bad habits from 95 to XP, but I guess I find that a really poor excuse because I was a heavy Vista user by choice, partly specifically for UAC. Washing your hands is great, and very professional, and decades of a habit of not washing your hands isn't an excuse I'd expect anyone reasonable to expect, but especially in a hospital. Anyway, I digress.)
I usually like asking what their staff turnover is like. It was very telling many years ago when I was told "very low, almost non-existent" and then promptly learned from my new colleagues that it was extremely high....
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I came here to say basically this. I've worked at enough companies to know that their ideas of what their values are may not be accurate. Instead of asking about values, ask about behavior. No one is going to say no to "Do you value code quality?" Aking what they've done (and sacrificed) to support code quality will give you a better idea of what their relative values are. Asking about their tech ladder will get you…
I listened to a podcast recently [1] that talked about "embodied knowledge", which is basically the idea that what we know is often very different from what we think we know. The idea being that you will learn much more about someone / something if you ask questions that are anchored to a time and place rather than generic "unembodied" questions. So the first question you list "Do you value code quality?" is an "unem…
"The inflammation in my body"? Sounds like a dopamine response in someone whose sympathetic nervous system is strung tighter than a kettle drum.
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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.
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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 o…
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/notepad-7.3.3-fix-cia-hac...
As both developer and a systems administrator, I am constantly on both sides of the fence. I have seen developers who cannot even maintain their machines and download any random thing to streamline their job to the detriment of security. Yet, I have seen other organizations where it takes months to get something like VSCode installed (try keeping that up-to-date on an air-gapped machine, that isn't connected to the internet... or ... Node.js or... full Visual Studio...)