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> What bugged me about the (X) environment when I was there? What would I change? I recently started as lead dev at a small company experiencing some real grow

> What bugged me about the (X) environment when I was there? What would I change? I recently started as lead dev at a small company experiencing some real growing pains. The CEO wisely had me spend a couple days my first week going around talking to team leads. It was very productive. I started with almost the exact same question Rachel suggests here. My version: > What's currently frustrating you? I deliberately left it open-ended and found many of the non-technical answers worth passing along to management. "Let the fools have their tartar sauce!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X25rP4rTw3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X25rP4rTw3A The other question I came up after my first couple meetings. I called it the Magic Lamp question: > If, as the magic genie of this company I could grant you three wishes, what would they be? By day two, these were the only questions I needed to ask. Following up with the CEO, we came away with a very clear vision of what our development priorities needed to be. Most of it aligned with what I already sensed coming in, but there were still some useful surprises for us both. (And, yes, found a few clever spreadsheets functioning as de-facto business applications.)

pg_bot 9y ago
That Simpsons clip leaves out the punch line, where Smithers attributes the decrease in the accident rate to the promotion of Homer.
- klenwell 9y ago
  True. I noticed that, too. And I think that lesson is as important as the "listen to your grunts" message: beware false metrics. It's a dense passage to be sure.
myth_buster 9y ago
This was posted a few weeks back... Career Cold Start. http://boz.com/articles/career-cold-start.html http://boz.com/articles/career-cold-start.html
twic 9y ago
I asked a similar question in my last round of interviews: "if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing, what would it be?". I thought this was a good way of getting an insight into what the team did, and how the people there thought about it. The boss of the team i eventually joined said something like "i'd like to be able to make all of our performance-critical programs fast enough without spending weeks tuning each one". Having worked there for a year, i can tell you that this is nowhere close to being a significant problem for the team. So yeah, ask, but don't take the answers at face value. People don't know what the real problems are.

pg_bot 9y ago

That Simpsons clip leaves out the punch line, where Smithers attributes the decrease in the accident rate to the promotion of Homer.

klenwell 9y ago
True. I noticed that, too. And I think that lesson is as important as the "listen to your grunts" message: beware false metrics. It's a dense passage to be sure.

myth_buster 9y ago

This was posted a few weeks back... Career Cold Start. http://boz.com/articles/career-cold-start.html http://boz.com/articles/career-cold-start.html

twic 9y ago

I asked a similar question in my last round of interviews: "if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing, what would it be?". I thought this was a good way of getting an insight into what the team did, and how the people there thought about it. The boss of the team i eventually joined said something like "i'd like to be able to make all of our performance-critical programs fast enough without spending weeks tuning each one". Having worked there for a year, i can tell you that this is nowhere close to being a significant problem for the team. So yeah, ask, but don't take the answers at face value. People don't know what the real problems are.