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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Hey, I'd take the offer - you get to see if the coding style and the procedures used are even remotely what you expect.

I personally would never join a place still using CVS for source code management, even SVN is something I'd like to have a night of good sleep before accepting. Same for not having proper bug tracker systems.

Edit: Also, as the introduction to How Stuff Works will likely be done by a dev team member, this presents you with the ability to ask the dev guys how the job really is, and not what a clueless HR idiot tries to sell you.

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A dummy project is your best bet. It provides a nice stable fixture from which you can gather repeatable data, and you can tweak it over time as you discover flaws in it.

If you're already employed, you're probably taking a day of vacation or sick time. So you're being paid. On the other hand, you're losing a day of vacation or sick time. This has been true for years and years (but that doesn't make it right).

Frankly I would seriously worry about trade secret exposure, and any restraint against "moonlighting" or competition by your current employer (some employers forbid working on open source as well). Working on live code puts both parties at risk here.

There are indeed companies where, if I had worked on their live code, I would never have worked there (one company was where I learned the phrase "train wreck").

> even SVN is something I'd like to have a night of good sleep before accepting.

Why's that? SVN may not be fashionable, but it's centralised, has ACLs and a hook system.

Because it will be a huge mess once you hit your first merge conflict or want to use proper branches. SVN is usable for source code management, but not really for efficient collaboration.

edit: And if the SVN server goes down / messed up by someone, you're essentially forced to sit around and staring into the sky. With git, all you may have to do is fiddle a bit with merging if someone did a git push --force. And if the server is down, you still are able to work on your own.

As someone who uses git and svn a lot, I'll say that git has more end user features. You can do so much more with git than svn. If you have to work on svn, you'll have to give up those features.

It might be a warning sign as well. An organisation on svn might be an organisation that doesn't upgrade and is resistant to change.

These are easy things to ask directly without working for free ;)

In most cases (distinct HR department) the HR guy doing the interview will have no idea what processes the IT department uses.

Worse case, the HR guy is actually a decent IT guy (so that the IT-related questions in the interview are actually fair), but he has multiple different IT departments which each use different operations policies so he can't answer your detail question. Happens especially in bigger companies or, as I experienced, in government.

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