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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

#391

Post by devdas »

kemiller2002 wrote: post #109
relax88 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

As a person whose straddled infosec and development, I always struggled with this. The multiple development machines is probably the best approach, but I've never truly seen it implemented correctly. I would love to not need admin access to my machine, but each time the companies I've worked for try this, it's always a struggle to do anything. This is everything from, "I need to modify/monitor core components of the…

IT security people also have different incentives. If developers got bonuses for uptime while being compliant with all security policy requirements, while security and operations got bonuses based on features reliably delivered, you would have different results.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#392

Post by chinhodado »

lvspiff wrote: post #388
chuckdries wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's too cynical. I'm sure there are many places where things are mostly uneventful - or "boring" to some people.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#393

Post by bradlys »

pm215 wrote: post #227
theamk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'll give my anecdote on this:

When I used to not have any questions after the interview - I got rejected what felt like a weirdly high amount and definitely a weird tone from the interviewer.

When I started asking questions - the interviewer seemed to have a much more positive outlook on me and my acceptance rate went up.

I've interviewed a lot and there are people you have to ask questions to or else they will reject you.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#394

Post by devdas »

tomp wrote: post #314
quotemstr wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> use a good software whitelisting program that tracks elevations & the reasons for them, instead of just blanket giving everyone local admin on their own PC You can propose such a thing. If you're in charge at a company, you might get to implement it. But if you do, know that it's a huge black mark against your company. I've seen how these whitelists work in practice. They're massive wastes of time. They get in the…

> We ought to protect data, not code. Code is more dangerous than data. Personally, I'd be most worried by someone getting a virus that hacks into other computers and encrypts them and/or wrecks the network. Both can be protected against, first by cold backups and second by resilient / disaster recovery network, but both would also severely affect the company for a few days, so I'd rather avoid them.

That's code destroying data.

Losing data is bad for the business. A random box had software crashing? Just replace the box.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#395

Post by freedomben »

ticmasta wrote: post #359
freedomben wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

This seems like such common sense to me that I'm surprised it isn't more common. At this point I think most managers are just too disconnected and don't realize how it really feels. I guess most people will also put up with a lot of pain before they go back out to the job market. I know I do.

I guess this should be motivation to me to get back to work on one of my crappy ideas that could turn into a startup ;-)

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#396

Post by seppin »

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…

> "Oh, you won't be working in the new building..." and was taken to an old, windowless, leaky, mold-smelling building with peeling paint and flickering fluorescent lights

Got similarly cat-fished. Companies always conduct interviews in their best offices, not the ones you'll be working in.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#397

Post by relax88 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #376
an_d_rew wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Or corporate firewall tools that block Android SDK zips as "hacking tools" for daring to include such evocatively named "black hat" files as a "traceview.bat". It's not my fault as a developer that Android Studio needs me to download such a zip quite regularly to keep working on Android stuff. It's an interesting hygiene problem. Semi-related, I love UAC, and taking UAC seriously. It's the closest thing we have to "g…

You're absolutely right regarding UAC in Windows environments. Windows 10 has even more awesome security features like credential guard and device guard that a lot of IT departments don't even know exist.

If UAC is disabled by GPO it's probably because of incompetence, apathy, or maybe the IT admins have just been browbeaten into avoiding anything that could inconvenience anyone.

There are also tons of companies with 15 year old Active Directories with tons of kludgy GPO configurations that nobody has looked at for 5+ years.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#398

Post by seppin »

donretag wrote: post #296
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…

> Problem: Interviewers lie. > and I was absolutely not going to be leading anything This scenario has been basically my life for the past several jobs. Companies will lie just to get you in the door. Never ask "Will I ...", because the answer is always yes. NEVER trust what a company offers.

Or, get it on paper. At least. They can still not fulfill their end but it'll be harder for them to ignore the discrepancy.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#399

Post by [deleted] »

crispyporkbites wrote: post #336
rolltiide wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The interviewer will quickly shift and try to sell the position to you "How long has this position been open?" is useful to subsequently ask "so why is this offer letter expiring in 48 hours?"

I wouldn’t bother, offers don’t expire, no matter what they say

[deleted]

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#400

Post by chinhodado »

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'm curious what the answer to this question is for MS/Google/FB/other big companies
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