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Another really good thing to ask is about culture. And not in the blunt "what is your culture like?", but rather frame it as dichotomies. Do you default to act
by perlgeek 7y ago
Another really good thing to ask is about culture. And not in the blunt "what is your culture like?", but rather frame it as dichotomies.
Do you default to action, or default to inaction?
How do you value quality of code vs. speed of delivery?
Do you prefer your engineer to do pure engineering, or prefer to get involved with the business side?
If you had a short production outage, and a root cause cannot be found easily, how much time would the team spend searching for it (before giving up)? Would that change if the same error occurred twice? Three times?
Questions like this that don't have an obvious, universal answer (IMHO) are a really good way to get a glimpse into the culture.
- skrebbel 7y ago> Do you default to action, or default to inaction? This is the reverse "Where do you see yourself in 5 years". Don't ask ridiculous questions like that, you know what answer you're gonna get.
- perlgeek 7y agoI beg to differ. Startups tend to default to action. Lots of big / conservative companies default to inaction. When you cannot judge from the outside, you could get interesting results.
- thefreeman 7y agoIs anyone really going to admit that they default to inaction though?
- dorkwood 7y ago> Do you default to action, or default to inaction? Why not just come out and ask "is it good to work here, or bad to work here?"
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoAnybody versed in corporate-speak is going to give the obvious, universal non-answer that "It depends; we try to balance things out appropriately."