Questions to Ask a Potential Tech Employer
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Perhaps you're in a phase of life where you just need the money to recover from an unfortunate situation. Still, you must figure out what are the criteria you won't compromise on, and make sure you're getting that. For some, it's work schedule; for others, it's communication styles. Maybe you'll be driven insane by my cheesy puns and so you'd probably want to figure that out ahead of time. Ask me what I'll do to ensure you'll be respected as an individual on the team.
When I'm a candidate, I like to ask how my failures will be dealt with. I will goof up at some point, the question is how is that managed. The larger point is there must be some discussion about potentially unpleasant situations.
Cheesy puns I can handle, are you adept at talking in movie references only?
Paraphrasing, he said something like, "most jobs require you to have work experience that is exponentially better than the work experience they will give out."
That is a huge red flag for me. If a place is straining itself to "hire the best" and put candidates through the paces of a very difficult interview process, but then the actual job is some full-stack bullshit where your specialty or past experience is completely disregarded and you just do whatever random work happens to someone's misguided priority this week (which is almost every start-up job) it's just a bad, bad deal.
In regards to those "hire the best", where the application process is more drawn out than top secret government clearance. Those just aren't for me. I'm not looking for top tier(I'm not), but I am looking for intellectual stimulation, and being involved in something that someone will actually be using. I get the majority of my satisfaction watching others use something I've created. My rant is over!
Why programmers can’t make any money: dimensionality and the Eternal Haskell Tax - Michael O. Church [1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20151221082425/https://michaeloc...
The company may not have any literal obligation to provide such things, and no one cares. If they don't provide such things, reject them, move on, life's too short.
Of course companies invest some resources in career development as part of their salary package, but it is likely to be less than what is ideal for you as an individual since you can walk out the door at anytime. Every developer needs to take control of their own career development because they gain the most out any investment.
This does not mean that you always take the highest salary, but you need to look at training and career development as an extra that is part of your overall salary package. In some cases the training offered to you is more valuable to you than it costs the company to provide and in other cases it is better to take the cash and invest it yourself. The important thing is take control of your own career development and don’t expect it to be handed to you by someone else.
Out of the four jobs which I have voluntarily chosen to leave, three of my four resignations were because the employer stopped giving me meaningful work that prevented skill atrophy in my primary areas.
Preventing this skill atrophy on my own time, such as with side projects, is (a) ridiculous and (b) a physical impossibility because of the burden of working hours and exhaustion demanded by the employers I had at the time.
It's absolutely unreasonable to say that someone must find a way, outside of work hours, to effectively perform an entire second job's worth of practice and development, because their job isn't giving them work that exercises them.
It's like hiring a super model, asking him or her to sit on a sofa eating candy bars all day as the work you are paying them for, but then telling them to use their personal time to remain fit for supermodeling. It's a patently absurd idea.
You're free to say the words "developers should take control of their own career development" if you want to, it's just absurd. I mean, in once sense of course you're in control. Even if the career development happens at work, it's you doing it, so you (by definition) are in control.
But you aren't just saying "you're in control" in the obvious, tautological sense. You're going further to say that you should place no expectations whatsoever upon your employer to match up real-world business items to your skill set in any way that is related to appropriateness or which factors in your goals. That's the absurd part. You're saying "don't expect your manager to actually manage anything ... just resign yourself to the idea that they will randomly throw undifferentiated business concerns at you like a dartboard."
Real management acts as a double-sided adapter, with bespoke, unpleasant business realities on one side, and well-fitting tasks that are matched up to employees on the other side. Converting bespoke, unpleasant business needs into appropriate, on-topic tasks for specialized employees is managing. Saying an employee shouldn't care about this, to me, is among the worst advice I can think of. This should be one of the primary things any employee cares about.
Because the one thing that absolutely won't happen, simply by physical limits of exhaustion and life responsibilities, is for you to personally cultivate or exercise those skills during non-work time. Yeah, maybe you can read a tech book here and there. Maybe you go to a conference. Maybe you occasionally do some open-source work. And all of that put together amounts to maybe 5% of what's actually necessary to stay sharp and competitive in the employment market.
Instead, you absolutely should hold the employer accountable. They are asking you to bear an insane opportunity cost of lost time whenever you're working for them -- so much lost time in fact that if that time is not actively dedicated to building competitive skills, you will quickly become unemployable and you'll be so atrophied that you'll have no option but to stay at that employer because no one else will want the shell-of-a-former-expert your current job will have morphed you into.
There are a lot of good reasons to quit a job. You might not be paid the amount you prefer. You might not receive benefits that enable the life you prefer. And you might not be asked to perform tasks that cause you grow in skill, solve challenges, or learn new things in the way you prefer.
For me, these are not tradeoff-able. An employer either satisfies all of them adequately, or else it's not really an employer but just a thing wasting my time that I quit from.
I think you might be missing that you have a total compensation and any costs to the company comes out of your salary. You could get lucky and the cost of the company providing you training and new skills is less than its value to you, but this normally doesn’t happen.
Think about it another way - if you lose a day a week of productive work because of training that means your employer is paying you for 5 days and only getting 4 days of work from you. This reduces your value to the company and hence how much they are willing to pay you. All things being equal you can choose to take a job at lower pay with more training or higher pay with less company provided training.
Also, there is no reason why compensation must be conserved when decomposed into some traditional monetary part and some part from goal achievement. It could just be that I become more costly to employ as time goes on while at the same time I never reach a degree of costliness that motivates my employer to end the relationship. In fact, that seems obvious and surely something businesses plan for when investing in a long-term hire.
Also, my value to the company is not only my short-term labor, but also my future stream of labor. If they want me to stick around such that they profit from that future stream, they may have to do things that reduce my short-term output. It all comes down to what is their discount factor.
Expecting zero support in this regard is the same as assuming a hyperbolic discount function (or an extremely low probability that you'll choose to continue with that firm).
Finally, some of this is simply non-negotiable biology. Self-Determination Theory and theories of heteronomous vs autonomous goal satisfaction are just biologically at odds with what you describe. Wise companies would factor this in rather than trying to shoehorn humans into non-human situations and require them to attempt to sublimate away the basic need or drive.
I think we might be talking past each other a little. It is not that companies should not provide training (most good ones do as it is in their interest for many reasons), but that each person should take responsibility for their own career development and not expect this is something provided by their employer. Apart from the fact that any employer is unlikely to invest the ideal amount in your development (since you can walk out the door), the training provided by the company reflects the skills they want you to have, not the ones that you might most want to have.
Letting anyone else set your training almost certainly is sub-optimal for you. Developers need to get out of the mindset that it is the company that grows them and into the mindset that it is their own responsibility. Sure you might take advantage of the opportunities offered by the company, but don’t expect that someone else will be responsible.
This usually means you should leave if they won't fix it. They either bait-and-switched you into a job different from the job you signed up for, or else they did not understand their own needs and hired a wrong-fitting person.
I agree that developers are responsible for their own growth -- in the sense that they should quit jobs that are not imparting experience to them that helps them to reach their goals.
They should not, however, work that demanding yet not-goal-empowering job and also perform overly burdensome self-study, second jobs, night classes, etc., to make up the gap created by their employer's lack of ability or willingness to plan or manage correctly.
> not expect this is something provided by their employer
The best way to take responsibility for your career development is to insist it is provided by your employer and to find a better employer if/when that's not the case.
I only have X hours of high productivity a week. I need the high productivity hours to effectively learn but they are also the hours that really justify my high income.
You can look at it in different way.
If company buys a car, it starts loosing its value. There is certain proportion you can write off each year and finally you can write off the car completely.
You are in fact suggesting the same to be applied to human beings.
I think that human beings can not afford that, they have to be as new also after 5 years of work, or even 10 and more.
This does not happen by itself, one has to put time and money into it and this should be fairly compensated.
There are two ways for it - it happens as part of work and is therefore compensated as salary, or it happens after regular work hours and is compensated as overtime.
There is no other way how it would be fair to the employee. They are not cars that can be used and thrown away.
I've worked with quite a few people who initially impressed me with how much they knew, but then they peter out and disappear after 12-18 months, because they can't be bothered to actually do work. Too often people want to be paid to enjoy their pet projects and work on whether component they feel like working on; not maintain their stuff when they get bored of it, and so on.
To be fair, you absolutely need to be able to learn and grow in a role to advance professionally.. But at the same time, some folks don't seem to understand that you're getting paid to use your existing knowledge to accomplish something you're already good at.
On the other hand, if someone got hired on for a typical mid-level developer/engineer position without any promises of a research/advanced engineering focus, they need to man up and do their job.
Sure. But often when that's the case your title will say something closer to "Principal Researcher", rather than "Software Developer Engineer".
Don't get me wrong, a good thing about a job in engineering is that figuring elegant solutions to hard problems is a significant part of what you do there. Also, you can definitely optimize for that being a larger part of your time, if you aim for that when choosing where to work.
However, the jobs for which that is the only function you are employed to fill, and where you are expected to delegate maintenance of your elegant solution to someone else, are exceedingly rare. That's why the academic job market in CS is so much harsher (including industry research labs) than the software development job market. And, for the record, research work does end up involving either some amount of grunt work or some amount of management work at every place and level I have seen so far (universities, industry research labs, etc)
I think this is a self-driven promise. Like another commenter said, this is up to your job description. If you work in the research department, you are more likely to do more "innovative" thinking than those who are hired to build a product because your primary job won't be building CEO a search box. "Product" can be interesting or totally banal, whether you are hired to build public-facing application, or internal application.
I say research focus is self-driven because unless you work in an extremely "do what I say or you are fire" environment, normally you can tell your lead or the product team how to build or enhance a feature. If you think your automated testing infrastructure looks broken, offer ideas to folks who are paid to build that part of the infrastructure. Sometimes, overstepping into another team's boundary is actually a good way to tell people you are capable of doing more than implementing a stupid drop down menu. IMO a good software engineer begins with you giving a clear analysis of the problem and providing a clear and competitive solution (pros/cons with other solutions). That's research, that's "leading", that's architectureing. As simple as building a drop-down menu, well, are you tired of writing a whole new menu every single fucking time yet? Well, here is a research, here is an architectural change - make that shit reusable and make your template whatever resuable, convince your colleague your suggestion is better than theirs and that they are idiot this whole time. No not that hash, but along that line.
And most real research job spend a good portion on writing and doing presentation.
Yeah I keep saying implementing a drop-down menu. But why? Because a lot of the tickets will be around enhancing user experience and that can either be very interesting to some, or extremely boring just because.
Are deployments a single click, or do you go down a 30 item list every time?
Users often push systems in new ways and have interesting issues; the 5th redesign because some manager got a new idea is not.
However, employers sure do promise autonomy and a creative role, only to attempt to turn that new developer into someone who is supposed to check JIRA in the morning and fix bugs or implement a narrow set of features defined (with little to no creative input), often with a corrupted form of agile that turns the daily standup into a daily application of deadline pressures and demands for status reports.
I've come to realize how valuable some of those stuffy old bureaucratic pratices really can be for me, as a developer. For instance, I have gotten a great deal of value out of formalized, written job description with everyone's signature on it, filed away with HR. Once you're in a relatively senior technical role, you will almost certainly have language like "determines technical requirements", "aligns software architecture with business interests", "makes technology choices", and so forth. These will often have a little percentage next to them, as if we can somehow explicitly state how much of your time these things will take. "Writes code to implement features" and "performs other IT duties as required" will probably also be in there, but it's unlikely, if you're in a senior role, that these will be more than 50% of your job description (certainly not that last one).
This works well, because if you're accused of "not doing what you were hired to do" when you refuse to maintain an old pile of crap without a clear path toward a better code base (where you determine the technology, business alignment, and architecture), or if people tell you the project that you believe clearly aligns with the needs of the business is your "pet project" and what you really need to do is complete those JIRA tickets, it's usually pretty easy to point to your job description (with everyone's signature on it) and make a very compelling case that you are in fact doing exactly what you were hired to do, and that someone else (often a project manager or business unit manager) is trying to grab job authority that aren't in his or her description, but are clearly in yours. You can also make the case that while you're always willing to pitch in and do what is needed, random tech tasks have greatly exceeded the percentage of your time they are supposed to be taking.
One thing I've slowly learned - the looseness and casualness of the software industry doesn't necessarily favor developers. Sometimes a formalized set of rules can really help us.
I hate managers who punish initiative-takers. I hope he got fired.
On our team we have a bunch of fun stories with lower RoI at the top of our ready backlog, that may never get pulled into the sprint, but are there if we eat all our vegetables (e..g code reviews) and get the Sprint goal done early.
Other questions I like:
* what are you looking for this position to do?
* what does success in this role look like?
I do data science so success is a little harder to define than in a software engineering role. It's a warning sign when employers want you to come in and spread some machine machine learning on things to generate profits in a business that so far is not doing so, or when you hear different descriptions of the role from most interviewers. It makes me believe that the business doesn't have consensus on what they want someone to do, and therefore, I will have a very hard time succeeding.
It is hard for me to get in that dating mentality that I should be testing to see if my interviewer and I are simpatico. I feel a lot of pressure to fill in the blanks on what I want to know without asking, so I don't seem like I'm still deciding if I want to work there.
I know that sounds ridiculous.
The only time I do well is when interviewing for roles in faraway Australia because I feel like I have no chance of getting picked up.
Or maybe Australians are just great at no-bullshit interviews and put me at ease like talking to a friend? Confusing.
Here's some questions I'd ask:
- what sort of training or growth opportunities do you have? - do you offer any aid for continued education or online courses? What about conferences? - do you have a buddy or mentor program to help me get moving quickly? - Are there any books or resources you recommend so I can hit the ground running? - If I got the role, what would make you feel you made a great hire in 6 months or a year?
These are great questions - I think I probably have trouble locating more junior dev opportunities.
I always do research on the history of a company but because of turnover it doesn't score me any piñatas to know where they started if the interviewer can't engage with the stuff I'm mentioning. :(
I have lost track of over the years how many time I have got the answer “nothing” to the question what do you know about the company.
I personally find it amazing that people don’t make the most basic investigations into the place they are wanting to spend most of their waking hours. It is like waking into a car dealership and saying to the first salesman you meet “I have $30,000 - just sell me any car as I don’t care.”
Australian are notoriously bad managers of non-Australians. We are often far too blunt and say things that we think are trivially minor that the non-Australian takes as hugely serious. We also expect and give far less praise than others for just doing our job. We do have a nice climate though :)
P.S. If you are from the UK or US they might treat you with a bit more respect... Put it down to cultural cringe
We must have talked for over an hour about how great we think Coffeescript is.. (I'm a zealot).
Anyway, I wish I could make more interviews like that. I've actually started putting it in my cover letters that I'd appreciate going for lunch or something just to hang out and talk about frameworks.
It's great when I can detach myself from 'needing a job'.
Another way to look at it, is I want to project reasonable expectations in their mind. Mismatched expectations is the root of many issues down the road...
The question is worded such that it's not offensive and doesn't sound like a "trying to find out the bad stuff" kind of question, so it puts people at ease. But it still gives people a chance to talk about the "bad stuff", to air out the things that frustrate them about the job. Those aren't necessarily red flags that prevent people from working at the company, but it's given me a pretty good picture over the years of what the day-to-day is like working on that product.
q: If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the company, what would it be? a: Get rid of all our customers.
q: How many hours did you work last week? a: All of them.
q: How many meetings were you in in the last few days, and how long did they last? a: Most of what I do is meetings.
q: What do you use for source control? a: We use $NAME but we forbid branching because merging is too hard.
q: Describe your build / deploy process. a: I don't think we have time for that right now.
q: What do you use for a bug / task tracker? a: Email.
q: How would you gague your technical debt? a: What's "technical debt"?
This is the state of most of the industry.
Mostly, only companies with cushy government contracts with unlimited time and expense accounts on their hands (think defense) don't want to fire their customers.
As for not wanting to fire the customers, upper management may not want to fire them, but those of us actually doing the work sure did. We hoped they would take their so-called "experts" with them.
Where I used to work, and the first place I wrote software full-time, we were not allowed to commit code to our system (Synergy) until after our code review. I ended up creating a parallel SVN repository so I could do incremental check-ins.
Don't get me started in merging...
If you're using a DVCS like git, though, that seems silly.
You will need Python 3 with the PyYAML, jsonschema, and jinja2 packages installed. Seriously?
- q: Would you say your colleagues are good at reading your emotional state, or still learning? # TODO: Better wording so the answer is not so obvious a: Research shows the most important factor in team effectiveness is psychological safety, a "shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking." One component of this is high "average social sensitivity," or that everyone is good at reading the emotional state of others. followup: Do you feel like your opinion is heard, respected, and valued? ref: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learn... pri: 1 tags: [culture]
But one question. What was thinking behind setting up the extensive YML structure instead of just using simple markdown? I see some reasoning with printing through a script, but will that be a significant use case?
This structure just seems complex for doing a quick PR with a question that I'd like to see added, and would keep me from contributing.
In the YAML, you can get away with just: -q: Your question here.
Why is this available in more than one format? Why on earth is there a filter.sh and render.py?!? This is just awful. If you can't read through a simple text list and select the appropriate questions then you're already doomed.
There's a temptation to use a structured, machine-readable formatting language for anything that has structure, because you might one day want to use machines to work on it.
But for an application like this, those times are the exceptions, most of the time, it's humans that are going to read and modify the text. It makes way more sense to use a human-oriented format and simply use a convention so that it's easy to use a tool to convert it when you need to. I see no reason why Markdown can't be used.
But otherwise, Markdown does seem like it'd be a better choice. Everyone's using it these days, it's simple, whereas YAML is obscure.
"I'd like a copy of the employee handbook to take with me"
The interviewer is trying to recruit you and also filter you out, but usually will not honestly respond to questions about what they don't like, or will hold some of those against you.
Ergo, you really have to ask "what is it like to work here" (and also culture questions, etc) and leave open ended questions, and then learn to read between the lines. Asking multiple people the same question can also be good.
Attempting to gauge enthusiam is good.
I find places that really want to invest in new hires and make them feel part of the team are the best (i.e. people that want to take you out to lunch and help go over code with you), but those are in my experience also a bit too rare.
You also need to figure out if the folks are smart, not burned out too much, and whether there's a lot of politics -- but it's really hard to filter that out from an interview, just in the same way it's hard for people to tell how a candidate is really going to be too.
> q: How many hours did you work last week?
> a: Working more than 40-hour weeks regularly decreases productivity.
> followup: Is that typical?
Certainly I wouldn't describe both ends of the spectrum with those words. Maybe "Hack it together" vs "Precisely assemble" is less judgemental
I would really like this as an option. If I wake up tomorrow and have no job, it would be neat if there were companies out there willing to pay me contracting rates for a few days, because it would let me pay my bills.
Reasonable management allows you to work towards fixing this, although might not always make what you consider optimal technical decisions.
If you can get along with your colleagues, get paid on time and not have the boss breathing down your neck I think that's a pretty good job!
Mostly this is to provide an opportunity to just answer a question, of course. But it's also true that a candidate's questions, or lack thereof, can affect my evaluation of them.
So, my advice: have a couple of good questions on tap. If you don't, you run the risk of seeming unprepared or lacking confidence.
i interview almost exclusively over the phone, and we don't fly people out to waste days of their life, or have more than 3 rounds of phone discussions, so maybe that's where this disconnect.
occasionally a very good candidate will talk for an hour or more, but that's an actual conversation, not a Q&A session.
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
also, i didn't ask "theoretically would you ask more than 15 mins. of questions", i said, have you been asked more than 15 minutes by a candidate, that you were interviewing.
in the real world, most people don't ask any questions. it's exceptional that we'll get thoughtful questions, and those are usually the people we hire/offer. and of those people, nobody has more than 15 minutes worth. and people who can't even answer basic questions like "how do you list the network connections on a linux machine" aren't given the opportunity to ask questions, because the call is over.
again, a long-winded technical discussion is a different thing, i'm talking about "tell me about your enterprise ticketing system and how many pointless meetings per week you have" type of questions.
If you only focus on tech details, you waste your own time and the interviewer's time.
Saving all this stuff for HR is a huge mistake. You won't get any useful info.
http://www.theladders.com/career-newsletters/it-s-not-about-...
- What do you believe is the role of a good manager?
- What do you do to support the people you work with?
- How do you handle technical disputes between employees?
- How do you decide who to allocate a task to?
for engineers:
- Describe some interesting problems you've encountered, and tell me how you solved them
- Tell me some of the interesting things you've learned as a result of your work
- How do you make important technical decisions
Ask HN: How to detect a crappy boss / toxic environment when interviewing? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449133
What questions should future tech employees know beforehand before going into an interview?
Does anyone have a playbook?
This is a simple but great one to end with. If they smile genuinely in their answer then that's good information for you and its good to leave them on a high note to tilt things in your favor.
Questions serve as an opportunity to "fill in" the employer on areas they may have forgotten to ask you. If they are not 100% that you can do your job (or are teachable) and that you will fit in with the company, it is your job to ask the questions that eventually give them certainty.
Shameless plug: Just released a book on informational interviews with a huge list of questions and walkthroughs on how to do them. Best way to get a job!
http://www.amazon.com/Informational-Interviews-Coffee-Superc...
Your advice seems to take a different approach -- that you shouldn't use questions as a means to ensure you will be happy in the job, but rather as yet another opportunity for status signalling.
Even the first sentence depicts a totally alien attitude to me: "questions that really hit home with the employer are..." ... What? I have no obligation to ask questions that "hit home" with the employer. If the employer doesn't like the questions I do ask, well that right there is a good indication that I would be miserable working for them and should just work elsewhere.
By approaching even the part of the interview where you get to steer the topics of discussion (your questions) with an attitude of infinite pliability and fealty, it makes the process even more about subjugation and hoop-jumping than it already is.
What I have found in my own career, though, is that you can't turn down a job or company if you are not offered. If you get an offer, and the company isn't a fit, it is your own prerogative to turn it down. Until that point, though, you are selling yourself and trying to get the job.