At the end of each interview, the applicant is asked if there are any questions left.
A rough estimate by my colleagues is that 4 out of 5 candidates will know team size, what time to come to the office, and less often about technology. Such questions work in the short term, because after a couple of months, what matters to them is not the quality of the technique, but the mood in the team, the number of meetings and the enthusiasm to improve the code.
Below the cut is a list of topics that will show problem areas where they don’t like to be mentioned.
Disclaimer:
Questions below do not make sense to ask the HR due to a conflict of interest.
About the work week
Ask about grooming, daily meetings and other Agile ceremonies. During the answer, observe what emotions the interlocutor experiences, how he tells, follow the facial expressions. Do you see enthusiasm or fatigue? Are the answers peppy or reminiscent of a retelling of a boring school book?
Ask yourself if in a month your loved one is interested in a new job, if you would like to tell the same.
About the frequency of fires
At my last job, the guys had fires at least once every week. Fires are masters at manipulating personal time. Every time the culprit stays in the office until late to find and fix the mistake. The team will be left with a bad impression if you want to leave on business when the company pays customers compensation for every hour of an unresolved bug.
Fires must be put out, but the team can get so used to this that refusal will be perceived as desertion.
About conferences during business hours
Although I was allowed to attend conferences at every job, I know speakers who were only released with revisions on weekends. No one cared that they benefited the company's technical PR. Even if you don't like conferences, the answer will show your future limits of freedom.
As a bonus, you will learn how to speak, prepare presentations, and immerse yourself in the community if there are people in the company who like to participate in conferences.
I was happy when I was paid for the flight, tickets, and also spending on housing and food. If I were a speaker, they would have made a $2000 bonus on top.
About strict deadlines
As with fires, this question is an indicator of the rate at which teams burn out.
Find out how often you will be asked to urgently complete a task in n days. Such teams tend to believe in the myth that tests slow development and that this messy class will be fixed next week.
A professional refuses to violate the principles of quality code. Each request to write a feature faster or try harder means that you are being hinted at writing poor-quality code or going beyond your efficiency. When you agree, you show a willingness to violate professional principles and admit to not doing your best until you are asked to "try hard" again.
Uncle Bob wrote about it .
Let's move on to my favorite question. Get by with them if you do not have time to ask the interlocutor in detail.
About the pros and cons
The question seems obvious and even stupid, but you have no idea how much it helps to form the final impression of future work.
I started with this question when I was interviewed by three developers. They hesitated and at first answered that there were no particular minuses, everything seemed to be ok.
What about the pluses then?
They looked at each other and thought
- Well, they give out macbooks
— The view is beautiful, the 30th floor after all
This speaks volumes. None of them remembered the project, hundreds of microservices and a cool development team.
But there is a 30th floor and MacBooks, yes.
When a person does not remember the bad, he either lies, or he does not care. This happens when the cons become something ordinary, like a herring under a fur coat for the New Year.
Since this is very similar to burnout, I asked about recycling.
They exchanged glances again with a slight smirk. One jokingly replied that they had been working since 2016. Since he said this casually, the other immediately corrected that all overtime was well paid and at the end of the year everyone was paid a bonus.
Frequent overwork leads to burnout. Interest first decreases to the project and the team, and then to programming. Don't sell your motivation for payroll and work weekends and late hours.
Hack and predictor Aviator
At each interview, discuss uncomfortable topics in detail. What was a formality will save months.
I support interviewers who reject applicants without question. Questions are like a time machine that takes you to the future. Only the lazy will not want to know if he will enjoy the work.
I had cases when the answers to these and other questions went into one and a half to two hour conversations. They helped build a detailed picture and saved months, if not years, of work.
This recipe is not a panacea. The depth of the questions and their number strongly depend on the area of the company. In custom development, more time should be devoted to deadlines, and in product development, to fires. Some critical details you won't learn until months later, but these topics help you find big problems when nothing on the outside portends trouble.
Thanks for the wonderful illustrations. .
Source: habr.com