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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

#431

Post by jrockway »

wikibob wrote: post #366
jrockway wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google in the US does this. I was on call for my team about once a month and at the end of the year, the bonus for merely being available was quite large. (I think it was something like $1600 a week, but I could be misremembering.)

My understanding is at Google it's counted as 33.3% time for every hour you are on-call with a 30 minute response time. And 66.6% time for every hour you are on-call with a 5 minute response time.

I believe that is for SRE teams. SRE teams are much more reasonable about on-call, having enough staff to have the on-call person on-call during their workday, not at 3am their time.

SWE teams often don't have the global coverage that entails, so they just pay you extra to be close to your phone.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#432

Post by kgraves »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #96
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…

> I don't think the GP intended to call engineers at those kinds of companies lesser. Why not? That's a prevailing opinion. SWE: Works for a startup. HN: RESPECT! SWE: Works for FAANG. HN: Respect. SWE: Works in an industry that's not related to the web. HN: Wait, what? I don't understand. SWE: Works anywhere else. HN: Crickets.

Comment of the decade.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#433

Post by reallydontask »

Diederich wrote: post #120
reallydontask wrote: post #69

> Is there a support / marketing / other call-heavy team close to my new team? This is so important. I can probably live with most open plan set ups, sure there will be annoying times, but if there is a call-heavy team nearby, forget it. I refuse to wear noise cancelling headphones all day long. FWIW, interviewers will blatantly lie. I asked at an interview about equipment quality and was told that they'd not heard a…

> I refuse to wear noise cancelling headphones all day long. May I ask why? Even when I work at home alone, and there are no stray noises at all, I'll still wear my headphones when I want to really focus. Years of mental conditioning has led me to a place where it's much easier to deeply focus when I'm wearing headphones listening to white noise.

It's uncomfortable for me as I have relatively big and slightly weirdly shaped ears. This in effect means that two hours is around the maximum I can wear headphones for.

If I take more frequent breaks I can stretch it to about 3 hours.

If we're losing the AC war, then it's normally the heat that does it.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#434

Post by mcv »

okaleniuk wrote: post #423
mcv wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was definitely a time when that was an important question, because the answer could be "CVS", "nothing" or even "what is that?". Nowadays the answer is practically always "git".

Indeed. But why git? I worked for 3 companies that adopted git for completely different reasons. The first was open sourcing parts of their code so they just started using GitHub. Makes sense. The second used to work with Subversion, and they stayed with it. The process was built around having one and only one server with all the CI, and the hooks, and the locks. Git was used with the SVN gate purely for developers'…

> "why git?"

Honestly? Because it's become accepted as the industry standard. People who need to make the decision without having knowledge about the topic just go with whatever everybody else is doing. In the past, that used to be whatever IBM was offering, then whatever Microsoft was offering. In that respect, git is a lot better. It's flexible enough to adapt to different kinds of workflows, at least.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#435

Post by jcadam »

dpflan wrote: post #207
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…

That's rough, almost sounds surreal. Have you considered looking for remote opportunities?

I've tried... nobody hires remote developers without remote experience. It's one of those Catch-22s, like getting credit with no credit history.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#436

Post by jhrmnn »

Jarwain wrote: post #318
everdrive wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Lying, manipulation, and violence share the same underlying theme: depriving someone else of their free choice. Either by withholding truth, playing on their subconsciousness, or threatening harm.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#439

Post by PopeDotNinja »

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…

A previous company I worked for had installed some company wide security software. It basically installed a root kit that scanned every executable, adding 250ms to boot time for any app. The problem manifested when shell scripts that used to take seconds started taking minutes or hours.

When this started happening, I thought that I had installed some malware. In the process of debugging the problem, I ended up finding & disabling the root kit through trial and error. When my machine started working properly again, I came to understand I had disabled the corporate security "malware". I reported the problem to corporate just as others started to report having the same slowdown error. They told me the vendor of the software was impressed I had been able to find it, let alone disable it. I believe their words were "you shouldn't have been able to do that".

I didn't get into any trouble. By reporting the problem, I actually helped kickstart the removal of that software from anyone's laptop where shell access was required. The vendor never could fix the performance problem, and eventually our company resorted to trusting the developers again.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#440

Post by jfb »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #413
jfb wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What about if you're a hiring manager for a software company in Japan or Korea?

I'll cross that bridge if I come to it.
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