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And how do you even "look" at it from the outside? Ask interviewers and they will always tell you that they have great culture, teamwork, etc
by TremendousJudge 4y ago
And how do you even "look" at it from the outside? Ask interviewers and they will always tell you that they have great culture, teamwork, etc
- Aperocky 4y agoEasy, Ask where the documentation is. Ask how much input engineers have on what they are working on. Ask how many meetings hours they average per day.
- replyifuagree 4y ago>Ask how much input engineers have on what they are working on. This is the way. Ask this question of people working at a legacy company and they won't be able to meet your eyes.
- TremendousJudge 4y agoThank you. These are valuable pointers.
- streblo 4y ago> Ask where the documentation is. I've had a reasonably long career and worked at a number of companies at this point, and I've never seen this 'documentation' that engineers are supposedly producing.
- Aperocky 4y agoWe really have the opposite problem, there are lots of documentations but they are not exactly organized or all up to date. Much easier to fix than not having any of them I would guess.
- baby 4y agoI feel like having too much doc is not really a problem :)
- spaetzleesser 4y agoWelcome to health care. We produce a ton of documents that then disappear into a terrible document management system to never be found again.
- gorjusborg 4y agoI think existence of documentation is a poor metric, personally.
- sfink 4y agoI think a better metric is to ask why the documentation isn't better. Nobody is ever happy with their documentation, whether they have too little or too much. But if the engineers think it's because they're being pushed too hard and there's no slack time available to write docs? Red flag. They have explicitly considered the question and realized that the effort to write the docs, compounded by the need to keep them up to date and/or the cost of allowing them to be out of date, is not worth it in their particular situation? Good sign. They feel kind of bad and guilty about the state of the docs? Too normal to be much of a sign, but still positive.
- streblo 4y agoThese questions are ultimately just asking what the work culture is like, they don't really have anything to do with documentation. And in that sense they're good questions to ask during an interview. As you allude to though, I don't think you're going to get good information if you just ask surface level questions about docs.
- chestervonwinch 4y agoThe meat of the question is, "where do you go when don't know how to do a thing?". The answer could potentially be "the docs", but that's not necessarily sufficient like you point out. However, you could ask follow-ups, e.g., whether the docs have multiple facets like user guides in addition to low-level API guides. OTOH, where you go when don't know how to do something doesn't necessarily have to be the docs, and info here can still be valuable to understand. E.g., are questions typically discussed in public forums or is it discussed in private DMs? The former is typically a better signal in my experience.
- abudabi123 4y agoCompare the quality in the documenation from lawyers and engineers in the company. True experts tend to be excellent communicators. SJ adequately described the short comings of Flash the phoneys pushed back against without merit.
- spc476 4y agoAsk if I find a bug in the code, what's the process to getting it fixed? And about how long is that?