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> I haven't had a 'relaxing' holiday without worries in over 12 months and so I'm considering a change. (I work in operations/devops engineering and not into s
by znpy 6y ago
> I haven't had a 'relaxing' holiday without worries in over 12 months and so I'm considering a change.
(I work in operations/devops engineering and not into sofware engineering so my point of view is a bit different, the underlying reasoning is applicable anyway, imho)
I made a point to grill the interviewers during the interview on such topics. HR bullshit like "we care for work-life balance" means nothing, I grill the technical interviewer when it comes to the usual "do you have any question for us?"
How do you manage on-call availability? How many people are on-call and how many at any given moment? Can on-call people escalate things further? To whom? Are developers on-call too? Do do you architect for HA? How? In your current architecture, what could be a single point of failure?
This kind of questions.
Any negative reply is a red flag. If I start seeing more than two-three red flags (or even one on an important question) then I'll pass.
My reasoning when I last changed job was that my job at the time was awful but I had a permanent contract, it would not have made sense to jump into another awful job and win the additional stress and risk derived from the probation time.
- shoo 6y agoThose are some great questions. Some other interesting ones might be: Do people on-call have the power to set up or reconfigure monitoring/alerting systems that cause them to get paged? How did the org react after the last production failure that had serious business impact? (e.g. did postmortem followed up by making process or technical changes to prevent or reduce frequency of issue recurring ; blame: some person at pointy end gets fired but nothing changes ; fear: production change freeze for 3 months, including blocking changes to improve production system reliability... )
- alicorn 6y agoAs someone who has interviewed maybe 30-40 sw and devops engineers over the last year, I wish more interviewees would ask things like this. It shows engagement and ability to speak up, as well as a healthy level of self care. Keep it up.