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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

#401

Post by scrooched_moose »

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 have a similar question - "What's your least favorite thing about working here".

I often get some very candid feedback, and have passed on couple roles because of what I've heard.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#402

Post by ben509 »

hvidgaard wrote: post #89
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"…

Developers can have local admin because it's expected that you can trust them. If they betray that thrust, then they lose that privilege, and depending on the nature of their work that might mean they cannot work. Bad for them, but surely it was written in their contract.

It's never actually in a contract, these are always policies since employment is at-will.

But "they cannot work" is implying that person gets fired. I agree that serious breaches of security are a firable offense, because it's plainly a fact that people get fired over them.

Generally, though, developers are fairly hard to replace and anyone who is hard to replace is equivalently hard to fire.

So most security policies have to work out some kind of compromise between those competing interests.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#403

Post by relax88 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #382
quotemstr wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dec…

> "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?"

Typically its because the GPO configuration has 15 years of kludge and your IT department is under resourced and doesn't have the ability to spend 6 months sifting through and testing all of it.

In Windows environments group policy is often one of the biggest piles of technical debt.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#404

Post by dredmorbius »

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?

Generally:

Good: Addressing the problem, fixing the process.

Bad: Assigning blame, firing the responsible.

(The latter especially for a first instance, though if you've got repeat instances, I'd look first to management, then to staff, for cause.)

Another bad sign is if the cause for the stress is internal, and a pass sign is if it's either management or a major (or the only) client.

If you cannot find ways to eliminate internal causes of stress, or buffer those created by the commercial environment in which you exist, it's going to be somewhere on the continuum between toxic and fatal to me.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#405

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

If I'm in an engine or equipment room, working on the engine or equipment, yes.

If I'm in an office, nominally for intellectual work, no motherlovin' way.

(I've done both. Equipment case can be tolerated and acceptable. The desk/office situation absolutely is not.)

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#408

Post by dredmorbius »

What's your disaster recovery plan?

What circumstances does it cover?

What is your threat model?

(Depending on response, address missing elements: external threats, natural disasters, power out, hardware failure, fumbling fingers, network-based attacks, insider threats, APTs. Acknowledging and not further addressing some particular threat is acceptable, ignoring it completely is not.)

How frequently do you drill for threats / failures? Practices such as Netflix's "chaos monkey" are close to best of class. Not at all is unfortunately the norm. Here I'd like to see some positive answer, but a widened eyes "oh, we should do that" would be encouraging, Dismissal would be many red flags. People respond to disasters according to their training and drilling, and failure to do either leads to poor response.

What is your professional development process? Name specific programmes / practices for entry-level to senior staff.

"What's a really good day?"

"What's a really bad day?"

Who's been promoted recently? Why?

What reasons have you had for making staff redundant?

What reasons have staff had for leaving?

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#409

Post by dredmorbius »

chinhodado wrote: post #392
lvspiff wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not in my experience.

"Firing the responsible" may be an overly-strong comment -- putting pressure on the line rather than improving line management is the upshot of what I'm getting at.

Though truly boring can be a good sign if it's the result of good planning, drilling, practices, and rewarding competence. If it's from complacency, failure to recognise problems, or the ability to push fault or failure off on others (clients, customers, vendors, suppliers, other departments), not so much.

The good sign then is understanding why and how they got to boring.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#410

Post by dredmorbius »

drongoking wrote: post #162
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…

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?

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