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How do you measure and quantify a team's quality when joining? Especially if you are moving from a different company, I feel like it is probably impossible to know as you may only meet a small subset of the team you work with, if you even get to meet anyone on your future team at all.

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I would say: - Look at what they have accomplished. But be sure you are looking at accomplishments of the actual team, not people who are taking the credit (that is a little trickier). - See if there is relaxed communication and trust. - Ask everyone individually what the goal of the team or the goal of the project is. Really talented teams sometimes put their individual goals ahead of the overall goal. As in: the front end engineer says a responsive front end is most important, an AI dev. says deep learning is the key feature etc. All can be talented and well meaning. But if everybody doesn't agree on the trade offs, effectiveness will suffer.

You can't measure it before you join, just as they can't measure your effectiveness before you join. The best you can do is hit the eject button after 6 months after you've assessed what's really going on. Same goes for the employer's side.

> You can't measure it before you join

You can generate heuristic data though. This really should be a priority for you during the interview process. They have the right to ask you very difficult questions, and you have the right to ask them very difficult questions as well.

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