July 25, I wrote blog post called “Interview” and I mentioned that maybe in year term will post yet another blog post with the same title. Now I’m writing post with almost same title. Is this due to the fact that I had interview again? –Yes and no. Actually I had two interviews since that time and did not post about them, and I will have two more interviews next week.
Real reason for this post is to extend the “Remember that you are also interviewing” section. I want to hear what you guys think about what we should ask on Interview to ensure that we get job of our dreams.

Job and happiness

I’ve been trying to find out for my-self what is the job of happiness. What does bring satisfaction from what we do.
I did not read huge range of articles and other resources on this theme, only couple of them. But besides of them I have my own opinion on this topic and will try to express it.
For example, this article states that connection between good job and happiness is overrated (?). As I understand from that article more evident role in job satisfaction is your own optimistic mood, which can be developed not only at your work but at home with you family. I agree with this, I now see that when I have better relations with my girlfriend I do have better desire to work. Also I disagree with this, because I think that everyday activities play very evident role in my satisfaction of my job. Currently everything is more or less good, but I do not get enough “I love this” work.

Cheese

But on other hand are you sure that your cheese is not getting old? And are you afraid to move to other position with new cheese? You have to read “Who moved my cheese?” This book brings into light some very important aspects of human fear to change things around even if their cheese is getting old or even if someone has moved it away. And I understand why those people are afraid. Guys like, Bodo Schaefer recommend to have something (ok, MONEY!) to ensure that you are safe. So unless you bought car or house in credit you are safe and can easily move to another piece of cheese. You know, I agree with them. I cannot buy house here in Lviv for money that I have, maybe some small car, but money that I have with bank interest and including my outgo is enough to live maybe 1-2 years without working at all. That is why I’m not afraid at all. And I would recommend you the same if you are still young – do not buy anything that is expensive and there should be NOWAY for credits!

Money table

Use following money table to find out if you have enough to feel free moving for better cheese; I have it automatically calculated in Excel spreadsheet:
You can put as Deposit MDeposit (e.g. 10000) -be honest
You need per day PerDay (e.g. 100) PerMonth=PerDay*30 -calculated
Per day to be happy PerDayHappy (e.g. 500) PayMonthHappy=PerDayHappy*30 -up to you
Ave. bank interest InterestRate (e.g. 0.12) MInterest=YouHave*InterestRate/12 -depends on banks
You are safe: YouAreSafe=PerMonth*6 YouHave > YouAreSafe ? (“you are more or less in good situation”) : (“Hey man, do you think about the future?”) -if you do not have enough to live half a year, something is definitely bad with your budget
You can live without need to work YouHaveEnough=PerMonth*12/InterestRate YouHave > YouHaveEnough ? (“you can stop working without impact on your life”) : (“it is too hard to reach this since needs often increase ”) months you have to wait to reach this goal:(YouHaveEnough-YouHave)/(MDeposit+MInterest)
You are free, or even rich YouHappy=PerMonthHappy*12/InterestRate YouHave > YouHappy ? (“hey! you are rich”):(“almost none reach this, since they start spending too much when they have enough”) months you have to wait to reach this goal:
(YouHappy-YouHave)/(MDeposit+MInterest)

What do I recommend to help you find out if some job is for you?

Create description of your dream’s job in couple of sentences. Then try to build questions that will help you correlate their offers to your dream.

Job of my dream

I work with newest technologies, designing and constructing architecture/technical approaches with professional team. In my team I have world level professional(s) from whom I can learn something new and really valuable, at the same time I see them and/or other team members to learn from me. All team members are open-minded passionate developers/QA/SM/PO. I’m more or less independent in my work organizing; customer trusts me, so I can do the best for them without their direct interventions. PO, representing customer, really knows requirements and goals of project and doesn’t push team to figure requirements for them. My employer is not afraid to invest money into refactoring/research and into team needs. They express respect to their employees and listen to them. They keep an eye on the project’s future and employees satisfaction, they do the best to keep employees motivated. Employees at the same time are really dedicated to help their customer/employer reach company’s goals.

Questions:

  1. What do you like about working for the X company? Why should I like it as well?
  2. What is the overall goal of the project I will be working on?
  3. Is project new? What are terms and team size?
  4. What are my duties for this project? In percents?
  5. What are the most challenging aspects of this position?
  6. What technologies will be used?
  7. Do you use recent approaches in software development?
  8. How to you measure code quality? Unit Testing? Code Coverage? BDD?
  9. Would it be possible to see piece of already written code?
  10. What methodologies are used for this project?
  11. With whom will I be working most closely? What is their professional level?
  12. Who is my supervisor? To whom would I report?
  13. Will I supervise someone?
  14. Are you interested in my professional development and how will this appear?
  15. Do you invest in refactoring/research?
  16. Do you accept initiative from your employees?
  17. Will I have many meetings per day?
  18. Is there anything else that prevents you from hiring me?

Also I was looking for some other good lists of questions. One is more general and other is awesome list of questions from stackoverflow.

Awesome questions list from stackoverflow

Here below in dark-blue is complete list of questions composed by Rob Wells on stackoverflow. This is copy-paste (!). All rights are reserved for stackoverflow and I do not pretend to be author of any part of it. Please follow this link to see original question.

Questions for development:

  1. What software development methodology do you use, e.g. Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, XP?
  2. Is training provided for the methodology being used?
  3. What parts of the software development life cycle do developers do?
  4. What is the breakdown of a developer’s day, e.g. how much time for support or troubleshooting, how much time for coding, analysing requirements, etc.?
  5. How long does your design, code and test cycle last? Less than thirty seconds, less than five minutes, less than ten minutes, etc.
  6. Do you encourage refactoring if sufficient unit tests exist?
  7. What test bench do you use?
  8. Do you have coding standards?
  9. Are the standards revisited or are they just left, as written, i.e. “carved in stone”, in 2001?
  10. Do you allow time for peer reviews of code?
  11. Can you give me an example of a code review that is done here. Are there different levels of a review, e.g. new system is handled in a day long explanation compared to a quick bug fix that is needed ASAP.
  12. Does the project use continuous integration?
  13. (If they use continuous integration) does your software build and test cleanly right now? What’s the current successful build rate?
  14. Does the project have regular regression testing?
  15. Are metrics kept for the code base? SLOC? Numbers of unit tests? Numbers of regression tests?
  16. How are conflicts resolved between testers and developers? I ask this because there have been times in the past where I see finger pointing of “Well, I interpreted it this way and he interpreted that,” enough to make me ask how is this handled.
  17. How are requests for large changes to be done quickly handled? For example, someone requests a web application that would normally take 2 weeks be done in 2 days for a prospective client that could be a big account.
  18. Do you use a software repository? (If the answer is no, walk out).
  19. What is the budget for tools?
  20. Do you offer your developers any sort of allowance to order technical books?

Questions about estimating:

  1. Do you have a standard template for estimating development effort for new work to make sure nothing is overlooked?
  2. A process for obtaining such an estimate?
  3. What percentage of contingency do you build in to your estimates?
  4. Do you allow time to revisit

Questions regarding the team:

  1. What has the team achieved so far?
  2. What has the team learnt?
  3. What aspects of the team would you like to change to improve the team?
  4. What’s the team spirit like?
  5. Where do team members generally have lunch?
  6. Does the team go out together every now and then?
  7. Do you encourage team members to give presentations to improve their abilities?
  8. Do you do the same with writing?
  9. Can I please speak informally to some of the people in the team I’ll be joining? (Useful to get beyond the management BS and get a feel for the real deal.)

Questions regarding personnel type policies:

  1. Does the company have a training policy?
  2. What were the latest courses that the company sent people on?
  3. Does the company have a mentoring policy?
  4. What kind of feedback mechanism is there for determining employee performance, e.g. how often is my work evaluated and suggestions given on where to improve?
  5. Is there a dress code? Do employees work a fixed set of hours?
  6. Is there any on-call time as part of the job?
  7. Do you encourage employees to set goals and provide incentives to meet those goals?
  8. Is self-improvement a value common to this organization?
  9. What’s your company’s Internet policy?
  10. What sites do you block? (I’ve worked at places where you can’t access various good technical sites.)
  11. Can I work irregular hours if I need to? For examle, at night, all the week’s hours in 2 days?
  12. Can I work from home?
  13. Do you have any policies against employees listening music while they work?
  14. How much work do you expect developers do outside of the normal business day?

Questions about management:
For the manager:

  1. What is your style of managing?
  2. How s/he motivates people
  3. How problems are handled (I leave that open-ended to see what sort of problem they assume–relating to those under them or those over them or issues unrelated to people at all, and then ask about whichever they didn’t cover).
  4. What the company does to help develop their managment skills
  5. What motivates them
  6. How much they work (typical hours/schedule)
  7. What accomplishment they are most proud of (I don’t specify work-related, and if they mention something besides that I ask about work as well)
  8. How they develop team cohesiveness and what they’ve been able to accomplish in that area
  9. What they see as the next big step for the team, for the company, and in dealing with projects or whatever the main mission of the group is

Then I ask them to answer the same kinds of questions for the company as a whole, explaining that I consider there’s such a thing as a company “personality” that usually emanates from the top. I ask how that has changed over the years (if they’ve been there very long).
Further questions on management:

  1. What’s your staff turnover rate?
  2. What’s the worst project you’ve ever been on here?
  3. How long does the typical hiree at my level stay with the company?
  4. How are projects categorized, e.g. changes compared to a small project compared to a big project?
  5. What kind of management is there within the company, e.g. is the development manager also the project manager or are these separate people usually?

Questions on the work environment:

  1. Can I please see my workplace?
  2. And, more specifically, can I see the desk where I will be working please?
  3. What’s the company’s policy to downloading software? (I’ve worked at places where you can download zip so it takes a week to get the help team to download the hex editor you needed yesterday.)
  4. How locked down are the PC’s? (I’ve worked at companies where the PC’s are so locked down it’s almost impossible to do any work e.g. no access to command prompt.)
  5. Do developers have admin rights on their PC’s? (Rule of thumb – The more locked down the PC, the worse the company. The real development sites I’ve worked at give all developers admin rights. They trust and empower them with corresponding rises in productivity.)
  6. What software is loaded by default on a standard developer PC? For example, can I use Eclipse or am I condemned to Notepad hell).
  7. Can I choose my own development tools?
  8. What sort of equipment do you provide to your developers? For example, are all developers given a laptop to work with, do they have access to two monitors, are they allowed to order other equipment (e.g. ergonomic keyboard)?

Miscellaneous questions:

  1. Why did the guy I’m replacing leave?
  2. How can I help you?
  3. What are your biggest needs right now?
  4. What kind of things would you want someone in this position to do?
  5. If you choose me, are there things I could read about your problem domain that would help me be effective on day one?
  6. Why the interviewer(s) work(s) there (or likes working there, or continutes to work there, etc). Their responses usually give me a good feel for the company.

Hope you liked this blog post. Looking forward to hear from you guys!

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