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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

#381

Post by __turbobrew__ »

goatinaboat wrote: post #279
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.

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!

That is a wide brush you are using. Once you start needing to prod the operating system internals or do any sort of devops work it is prudent to have root access.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#382

Post by WorldMaker »

quotemstr wrote: post #239
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.

Important followup: "Am I allowed local unconstrained root without a usually-performance-killing daemon interfering with my work?" At a few places, I experimented with running Windows. Every time, the Windows machine came with Bit9 or some other performance-killing compatibility-breaking security "solution" that made the system unusable. Windows is a great operating system. What IT departments do to Windows turns it…

> Windows is a great operating system. What IT departments do to Windows turns it into a nightmare.

That's a great bumper sticker.

There are so many cases you find of people's Windows complaints where the questions are "Why does Windows even allow GPO to hurt users that badly?" and "Why does your IT staff hate you so much personally that they configured Windows into that particular contortion?"

The Unix world has decades of tales of the "sysadmin from hell" / BOFH, of course, but something about Windows administration just seems to elevate to almost universal "art form" across every company, but at the same time has managed to make it "business as usual" rule rather than the to-be-irked-by exception. On no other operating system would that level of IT micromanagement and terrible "security products" be accepted, and on just about no other platform would people just as easily assume it to be OS "bugs" or "inabilities" rather than the forced masochism of some local BOFH.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#383

Post by chuckdries »

aniham wrote: post #285
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…

One question I like to ask is "Tell me about the worst day (work-wise) you've had in the last six months." Most of the answers I've had gotten generally have to do with escalations and I find that answers are quite honest and unpracticed. I think the way a team/company handles an unusual high-stress situation is in many ways telling of the team/company dynamic in general. And as a bonus, there's usually a good anecdo…

> I think the way a team/company handles an unusual high-stress situation is in many ways telling of the team/company dynamic in general

What sorts of signals do you look for in these answers?

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#384

Post by war1025 »

hinkley wrote: post #378
war1025 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hanging out with permaculture people (going on 6 years now) gives me an idea of what it must be like to hang out with famous artists. How can someone be so right and so crazy at the same time? "The inflammation in my body"? Sounds like a dopamine response in someone whose sympathetic nervous system is strung tighter than a kettle drum.

Don't have a good response other than that I completely agree. :)

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#385

Post by WorldMaker »

gonzo41 wrote: post #126
smashface wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the GP intended to call engineers at those kinds of companies lesser. I think the point that was made was that working at companies where the company makes more revenue by having better software is a better company to work for. If your role is a cost you're treated (explicitly or implicitly) as such. It's a lot easier to show your value to a company by being part of the revenue side of the equation. Red…

--companies where the company makes more revenue by having better software. You can get vibe of a company by asking if IT is seen as a cost center. If software is a competitive advantage you know that it's green pastures for your and yours. But places where culture holds back engineering, like being slow on the uptake of GIT or CI/CD which is often talked about online, these are places to be wary of. Those latter com…

A version of this line of questioning that in hindsight I sort of wished I had asked interviewing at one previous employer is something along the lines of "How much do you think your executives believe that you do in software they could go back to doing entirely on paper if they had to?" I don't know the precise wording yet, and I know it's not a universally necessary question for every "all of IT is a cost center" firm. IT can be a cost center, fine. Software development can be rolled up under IT for a number of reasons, sure. But IT shouldn't be seen as an "optional" cost center, "software" as some accidental by-product of a business dealing with a lot of "paper" when the company scaled to millions in annual revenue on the back of software-based productivity. There's entire industries, such as Insurance, that have some weird delusion that if they lost all their software overnight they'd just go back to do everything on paper and imagine they'd have zero re-scaling nightmares, brownouts, burnouts, or profit loss. It's so weirdly out of touch with reality, and I think a huge part of the disconnect (including the pay gap) between the ~post-70s C-Suite and the day-to-day operations of the majority of modern corporations.

I'm not even sure had I figured out exactly what that question should be if it would have helped that younger version of myself in the place that I was at, but it's still a useful lens moving forward if I have to stay in the "dark matter" parts of software development in the parts of corporate America that don't consider themselves software development companies.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#386

Post by rolltiide »

duxup wrote: post #375
Jolter wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're a small shop with a lot of "heads down working on stuff" going on. We actually usually know what everyone is doing to some extent. I'm not sure my manager is seriously concerned as much as he wants words to say when someone else asks ;)

Just make sure the slackbot is posting the standup in a channel that everyone is in. Problem solved. No rationalizations required.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#387

Post by eb0la »

lkschubert8 wrote: post #195
ed312 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if you have operations in Europe.

Standard here in Spain is 30 days off (including weekends and bank holidays). Most companies just offer 22 working days. I worked for one that offered 24.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#388

Post by lvspiff »

chuckdries wrote: post #383
aniham wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One question I like to ask is "Tell me about the worst day (work-wise) you've had in the last six months." Most of the answers I've had gotten generally have to do with escalations and I find that answers are quite honest and unpracticed. I think the way a team/company handles an unusual high-stress situation is in many ways telling of the team/company dynamic in general. And as a bonus, there's usually a good anecdo…

> I think the way a team/company handles an unusual high-stress situation is in many ways telling of the team/company dynamic in general What sorts of signals do you look for in these answers?

Beware the company that replies with "there haven't really been any" - they are lying or every day is stressful.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#389

Post by nemetroid »

jjkaczor wrote: post #380
dangus wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

... You are aware that at a point in time, Notepad++ was compromised, right?... 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 w…

Notepad++ wasn't compromised, at least not in the incident referred to in that link.

> It's not a vulnerability/security issue in Notepad++

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#390

Post by jjkaczor »

nemetroid wrote: post #389
jjkaczor wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... You are aware that at a point in time, Notepad++ was compromised, right?... 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 w…

Notepad++ wasn't compromised, at least not in the incident referred to in that link. > It's not a vulnerability/security issue in Notepad++

Ah yes - gotta love the HN pedantry - you are of course technically correct, however - a library used by Notepad++ was compromised for a period of time.

Outcome from a security perspective was the same.

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