411–420 of 467 posts
I'd love to ask, "Why do people quit?" during an interview, but can't think of a way to phrase it without sounding accusational or pretentious.
I think asking something like “when people don’t work out and end up leaving the company what are some of the typical causes of that mismatch?” wouldn’t raise a red flag.
Specialisation is high, training is long, skillsets frequently expire quickly (at least relative to careers / education), certification lags worse than training does, in many instances, and information aquisition costs on both sides of the hiring line are high: employers have difficulty in finding good/suitable candidates, candidates have difficulty in finding and/or assessing good employment fits.
Rewards once on a gig are highly disproportionate, with some high-paying companies, a strong gamble on equity (usually fails to pay off, very rarely does), and increasingly draconian employment terms and contracts (again, California law is exceptional, but as labour gets priced and simply slotted out by housing prices and unavailability, other centres with far less favourable working conditions may gain traction).
The idea of working as an individual at a given company for 18-36 months, then moving on (typical job tenancy) seems highly inefficient.
Chunking labour into a force that can be deployed might address that. Less a union than a guild, perhaps. Structuring that (and accommodating various state's and nation's employment and organisation laws) is an interesting challenge.
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What does "diversity" mean in your question #1 and how is it relevant to successful outcomes?
Demographic diversity, diversity of backgrounds, diversity of experience. Monocultures are actively destructive of successful outcomes, and lead to miserable working environments. The question is asked open-ended in that fashion because I want to discover what a potential employer thinks is important.
I'd love to ask, "Why do people quit?" during an interview, but can't think of a way to phrase it without sounding accusational or pretentious.
I got a genuine and thoughtful answer. It helped me to establish quite clearly what value systems wouldn't fly in the company which guided me on how to behave.
It worked out well.
Essentially you're trying to figure out "if you hire me and what is true about me then things won't work out?". You want to know if you have those qualities. If you do, you shouldn't accept an offer if you get one. It's a reasonable and good question.
I've known excellent people flame out in weeks because the companies values just didn't match their own. They weren't bad employees either. It was just a difference of opinion.
I think, the "source control question" comes from the Joel Test which is 19 years old. Almost every company uses source control now so it doesn't make as much sense. A better question would be "why do you use [the source control they use]". The answer, if coming from a knowing person, may tell you quite a lot about how the technical decisions are taken in the company.
Almost is the key word there. Although I would say that "what source control do you use?" is important also. Cause if the answer is "source safe" or something like that...
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> 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.
Worked well.
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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?
Obviously, it's up to management if they want this to be a part of the interview.
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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"…
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…
1) How long has the team/project I'll be joining been around?
Are you joining a team that's in maintenance mode or are they projects other than just refactoring/simplifying or migrating code to the latest and greatest . As an eng and even manager you really want to join very young teams and large teams >= 6 people (is the company serious about this project? burn rate > 1 million year). That gives you most runaway to develop something new and then brag about all the features you landed at promotion. Most large companies give fledgling teams 2-3 years to become viable. Try to stay away away from teams that have been around for a long time unless it's your area of expertise or you're excited about the project/work.
2) What's the churn rate? Who's the oldest eng. team member (in terms of how long they've been on the team of course) and was the person promoted while working on the project? The higher the level this person is on the team the easier it will be for you to get promoted.