When was your last vacation? Where did you go?
When was the last time you thought about changing jobs? Why?
When you joined this company, what were your goals? How many of them have you met?
Questions to ask a company during a job interview
461–467 of 467 posts
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#462Problem: 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.
I've always ended up with on-sites on the shiny, clean, well-stocked sales floors. When I ask to see where the engineers sit, it's usually a pretty abrupt downgrade.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#463Earlier 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…
I mean, my operating system itself was compromised many times, is my employer going to take that away too?
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"Your values are what you promote for." I like to ask about recent promotions and reasons, or conversely, asking who's been promoted based on the stated values in response to the direct question. Basically: how do you track and credit for this?
Another way to phrase: "What does it take to succeed here beyond hard work?"
EDIT: and "Imagine I've been working here for 3 months and you are very happy with my performance: what am I doing?"
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#465Problem: 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…
>My title is going to be Lead Engineer, will I actually be a Lead Engineer?
You offer letter should have the title in there, what did that say?
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
I joined a team that does agile software development. Apparently that meant that occasionally a slack bot asks me what I did recently.
That's what happens when programmers get promoted, even your bosses try to automate their jobs.
My manager does this. He is incredibly wary of adding process so he tries to automate it and it never gets implemented. For example, every quarter he tries to come up with some automated system for assigning code checks. It usually has some jank that causes it to go unused and we fall back on just asking one another as needed until he tries again.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That would be strange, as I'm a manager and don't write much code these days. I'm a manager that rarely codes as well, but was still asked coding questions in an interview. It's a bit annoying, but having had managers that have never written a line of code ever, I understand wanting to verify that the manager could theoretically do the work themselves.
I can theoretically do the work and I certainly understand the technical problems my teams are solving. I'd happily write some pseudocode to prove I know general things, but asking me to write the fastest version of X isn't going to prove I can manage people. Heck, that's not even a good question for most developer positions.
FWIW, I recently interviewed for a manager role and there was a coding element. It required a small amount of cleverness and some knowledge of basic data structures. It felt appropriate to me, at least to establish that I would have some clue about how things work.
That said, it was the only one of my four interviews that actually included any coding.