12 ms·

I'm a contractor so long term questions are irrelevant to me, but my standard questions are the following: Will i have the freedom to use whatever OS and softw

I'm a contractor so long term questions are irrelevant to me, but my standard questions are the following: Will i have the freedom to use whatever OS and software i want? If the answer to this is anything other than Yes, i dont take the gig. Give me the tools to do my job and trust me to do it, i'll even bring my own tools, i like a mac and sublime. I once had a potential employer tell me that i was only allowed to use windows, only allowed to use eclipse and i'd be issued an MSDN license even though they admitted it wasnt relevant to me, because that was standard IT policy. Sorry, no thanks. Is the office a relaxed environment? I can usually answer this myself if i'm doing a face to face just by looking at how people are dressed and such, but a lot of the time i have a phone interview first, and then i ask this. I absolutely will not work anywhere where i cant wear jeans and a t-shirt and if i walk in at 9.08am and you're going to moan at me for it, no thanks. I've also seen places where they dont allow employees to leave the building except at pre-defined lunch and break times, again, no deal. While these might seem petty to some people, to me they're indicative of an overall culture of not trusting employees and excessive micromanagement and i have the luxury of totally avoiding places like that, so i'm going to.

jkubicek 14y ago
I used to ask what a company's email quota was. Not a big deal at my last two employers, but previous jobs (banking and state government) had very low quotas, something like 20-50MB. At levels that low you can't just archive your email, you've got to decide what stays and what goes and carefully file away any attachments you might want to retrieve in the future. Not only a waste of time, but it adds unnecessary cognitive overhead to the simple act of checking your email.
- derekp7 14y ago
  Generally quotas are only implemented on the server. So the easy way to work with that is to set up a rule to automatically move all your incoming mail to a local folder. Of course this does break the ability to access your email form multiple clients, or use web mail, unless you have the rule set to replicate locally and let mail sit on the server for 7 - 14 days.
  - bdavisx 14y ago
    You can't do that if you're in a job where everything has to be accessible by either lawyers (discovery) or security -- well, there are probably ways to handle that, but it's just easier to not allow local folders for email.
- nathan_long 14y ago
  That's an incredibly outdated policy. A 4TB hard drive now lists for $150. This means that 50MB costs a fraction of a penny, and the price is dropping. Every second that a minimum-wage employee spends deleting emails to get down to that low a quota is a flagrant waste of money. The higher-paid the employee, the more flagrant the waste. This is seriously like paying your employees to collect individual pieces of pine straw so you can save money on landscaping. Not to mention the fact that those emails probably contain data that's worth more than their storage cost, especially if they're searchable.
  - T-hawk 14y ago
    > That's an incredibly outdated policy. Indeed. Hence the question is a useful filter, to identify and avoid companies who have incredibly outdated email systems and technology policies. They won't be leading-edge in anything else either. Similar: "What does your company use for email? Lotus Notes?" (Unless you're applying to IBM itself.)
hga 14y ago
"Will i have the freedom to use whatever OS and software i want?" Indeed; I learned EMACS at an impressionable age, so that made it simple (one program, which I could supply my own licensed copy back when that was necessary). Otherwise, no deal, that level of inflexibility is beyond the pale. Another aspect of "relaxed" is can you choose your own username and email address (I've used the same one since 1978 (sic))? I can think of only one company I worked at where that was both an issue and it was really good to work for.
- ajross 14y ago
  The username/email thing is going to rule out large employers almost universally. They have IT departments with existing processes. Now, maybe that's your goal, in which case it's a reasonable decision (though a much easier way to get that info is just to look at the size of the building you are standing in instead of wasting time in the interview!). Some of the responsibility of finding a "good" work environment lies on the employee too. If you go into the process expecting to find a "perfect" employer you're going to be disappointed. This is true in professional software environments just like it is in life: everyone has different values, and if you want to be happy you need to be willing to compromise a little. I'm not saying that there aren't objectively "bad" professional cultures out there, but if you put your requirements on a big bullet list like this you're going to be ruling out a bunch of objectively "good" ones too.
  - hga 14y ago
    Ah, I was of course referring to small companies that shouldn't have that set in stone. But, then again, if I go to work for a large company I know it's unlikely to be a "really great place to work for" ^_^. That one exception was a very small startup ... and that inflexibility was a sign of internal issues that helped kill it, just not ones that got in the way of if being good for the programmers, until it went under of course.
jaredmcateer 14y ago
I did 4 years of contracting and by the time I was tired to chasing cheques I had accumulate more pairs of pajamas than I had jeans let alone business casual (and one suit for when I went to meetings.) First place I applied the Director of Tech was wearing a baby blue hoodie with gold gilding and the VP was in a t-shirt, shorts and flip flops, I knew I could get along here. Summers in Canada are terribly short and I don't want to waste them wearing slacks and dress shirt.
- nathos 14y ago
  I've never really understood the fascination with dressing like you're still a sloppy college kid. Some of us actually enjoy dressing like a grownup.
  - packetslave 14y ago
    and some of "us" don't think how you dress has anything at all to do with being a "grownup". I wear what's comfortable for me: jeans, T-shirt, sneakers. My employer couldn't care less.
    - nathos 14y ago
      Like it or not, personal appearance (including dress, grooming, etc.) speaks volumes about you. Just ask a potential employer (or mate!). It's about signaling. Sure, some people are able to overcome those filters through outstanding performance elsewhere, but why not give yourself every advantage possible? Why not strive to be the best version of yourself? In my case, I design things for a living. What does it say about me if I didn't care about my personal appearance? "I care deeply about how things work and look. Yeah, but I couldn't be bothered to put on pants or a clean shirt today" But to your point, I do agree with you. Do what's comfortable for you. In my case, dressing better (something I've tried to do for the past year or so, after several years of hoodies and ill-fitting jeans) has made me a better, more confident person.
      - disgruntledphd2 14y ago
bluedino 14y ago
> if i walk in at 9.08am and you're going to moan at me for it, no thanks I'm all for relaxed starting times, but at my current company that seems to have led to other, bad things: relaxed deadlines or other accountability. It also sucks when something is broken at 8:00am and the guy that wrote that module (or made changes to it on Friday evening) isn't there for another hour.
- cygwin98 14y ago
  I'm curious to know what you would expect from that guy if that module broke at 4:00AM?
  - bluedino 14y ago
    In our case, it's an app that's really only used from 8am-5am EST. If there's a problem at 4:00AM it's not a big deal. It's a different story when there are live customers. Although, (ideally) any problem like that would be cost by a testing suite.
    - cygwin98 14y ago
      I agree you do have a point. Though that's the nature of running a business: people do take days/vacations off, so prepare for that.
    - georgemcbay 14y ago
      If you have developers making changes to production systems with live customers, the real problems at your company have little to do with when people show up for work. I rarely roll in to work earlier than 10 am, and that is down from about 11 am at my last job since this one has a regular 10 am scrum meeting. Yet, I wouldn't consider leaving a broken build active on Friday evening, and I'm just talking about the tip build in source code control, not a broken production system. I wouldn't even consider working for a place where developers just pushed new code willy nilly to live production systems, because that's just stupid.
- Nursie 14y ago
VLM 14y ago
"i walk in at 9.08am and you're going to moan at me for it" If they have a formal written policy that on paper you're fired after being documented as arriving late 3 times, and traffic / weather / commute / home life means you'll be late about once a quarter that means you'll only get to work there 9 months before the sword of Damocles is permanently hanging over you. This can be kind of a hint about what the workplace environment is really like. Another hilarious one is "can I work from home" "no" "oh cool no pager duty or on call" "well wait a second, I just meant you can't work from home 9-5". If your boss does trust you to work at 2am but not at 2pm when at home, its just kinda weird.
drewcoo 14y ago
Asking about tools is kosher in non-contracting gigs, too. If you can't have your box like you like it then just walk away. There are too many open positions everywhere now to even bother moving forward in an interview unless you know you're going to be productive. "Relaxed" is a lot more subjective . . .

jkubicek 14y ago

I used to ask what a company's email quota was. Not a big deal at my last two employers, but previous jobs (banking and state government) had very low quotas, something like 20-50MB. At levels that low you can't just archive your email, you've got to decide what stays and what goes and carefully file away any attachments you might want to retrieve in the future. Not only a waste of time, but it adds unnecessary cognitive overhead to the simple act of checking your email.

derekp7 14y ago
Generally quotas are only implemented on the server. So the easy way to work with that is to set up a rule to automatically move all your incoming mail to a local folder. Of course this does break the ability to access your email form multiple clients, or use web mail, unless you have the rule set to replicate locally and let mail sit on the server for 7 - 14 days.
- bdavisx 14y ago
  You can't do that if you're in a job where everything has to be accessible by either lawyers (discovery) or security -- well, there are probably ways to handle that, but it's just easier to not allow local folders for email.
nathan_long 14y ago
That's an incredibly outdated policy. A 4TB hard drive now lists for $150. This means that 50MB costs a fraction of a penny, and the price is dropping. Every second that a minimum-wage employee spends deleting emails to get down to that low a quota is a flagrant waste of money. The higher-paid the employee, the more flagrant the waste. This is seriously like paying your employees to collect individual pieces of pine straw so you can save money on landscaping. Not to mention the fact that those emails probably contain data that's worth more than their storage cost, especially if they're searchable.
- T-hawk 14y ago
  > That's an incredibly outdated policy. Indeed. Hence the question is a useful filter, to identify and avoid companies who have incredibly outdated email systems and technology policies. They won't be leading-edge in anything else either. Similar: "What does your company use for email? Lotus Notes?" (Unless you're applying to IBM itself.)

hga 14y ago

"Will i have the freedom to use whatever OS and software i want?" Indeed; I learned EMACS at an impressionable age, so that made it simple (one program, which I could supply my own licensed copy back when that was necessary). Otherwise, no deal, that level of inflexibility is beyond the pale. Another aspect of "relaxed" is can you choose your own username and email address (I've used the same one since 1978 (sic))? I can think of only one company I worked at where that was both an issue and it was really good to work for.

ajross 14y ago
The username/email thing is going to rule out large employers almost universally. They have IT departments with existing processes. Now, maybe that's your goal, in which case it's a reasonable decision (though a much easier way to get that info is just to look at the size of the building you are standing in instead of wasting time in the interview!). Some of the responsibility of finding a "good" work environment lies on the employee too. If you go into the process expecting to find a "perfect" employer you're going to be disappointed. This is true in professional software environments just like it is in life: everyone has different values, and if you want to be happy you need to be willing to compromise a little. I'm not saying that there aren't objectively "bad" professional cultures out there, but if you put your requirements on a big bullet list like this you're going to be ruling out a bunch of objectively "good" ones too.
- hga 14y ago
  Ah, I was of course referring to small companies that shouldn't have that set in stone. But, then again, if I go to work for a large company I know it's unlikely to be a "really great place to work for" ^_^. That one exception was a very small startup ... and that inflexibility was a sign of internal issues that helped kill it, just not ones that got in the way of if being good for the programmers, until it went under of course.

jaredmcateer 14y ago

I did 4 years of contracting and by the time I was tired to chasing cheques I had accumulate more pairs of pajamas than I had jeans let alone business casual (and one suit for when I went to meetings.) First place I applied the Director of Tech was wearing a baby blue hoodie with gold gilding and the VP was in a t-shirt, shorts and flip flops, I knew I could get along here. Summers in Canada are terribly short and I don't want to waste them wearing slacks and dress shirt.

nathos 14y ago
I've never really understood the fascination with dressing like you're still a sloppy college kid. Some of us actually enjoy dressing like a grownup.
- packetslave 14y ago
  and some of "us" don't think how you dress has anything at all to do with being a "grownup". I wear what's comfortable for me: jeans, T-shirt, sneakers. My employer couldn't care less.
  - nathos 14y ago
    Like it or not, personal appearance (including dress, grooming, etc.) speaks volumes about you. Just ask a potential employer (or mate!). It's about signaling. Sure, some people are able to overcome those filters through outstanding performance elsewhere, but why not give yourself every advantage possible? Why not strive to be the best version of yourself? In my case, I design things for a living. What does it say about me if I didn't care about my personal appearance? "I care deeply about how things work and look. Yeah, but I couldn't be bothered to put on pants or a clean shirt today" But to your point, I do agree with you. Do what's comfortable for you. In my case, dressing better (something I've tried to do for the past year or so, after several years of hoodies and ill-fitting jeans) has made me a better, more confident person.
    - disgruntledphd2 14y ago

bluedino 14y ago

> if i walk in at 9.08am and you're going to moan at me for it, no thanks I'm all for relaxed starting times, but at my current company that seems to have led to other, bad things: relaxed deadlines or other accountability. It also sucks when something is broken at 8:00am and the guy that wrote that module (or made changes to it on Friday evening) isn't there for another hour.

cygwin98 14y ago
I'm curious to know what you would expect from that guy if that module broke at 4:00AM?
- bluedino 14y ago
  In our case, it's an app that's really only used from 8am-5am EST. If there's a problem at 4:00AM it's not a big deal. It's a different story when there are live customers. Although, (ideally) any problem like that would be cost by a testing suite.
  - cygwin98 14y ago
    I agree you do have a point. Though that's the nature of running a business: people do take days/vacations off, so prepare for that.
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    If you have developers making changes to production systems with live customers, the real problems at your company have little to do with when people show up for work. I rarely roll in to work earlier than 10 am, and that is down from about 11 am at my last job since this one has a regular 10 am scrum meeting. Yet, I wouldn't consider leaving a broken build active on Friday evening, and I'm just talking about the tip build in source code control, not a broken production system. I wouldn't even consider working for a place where developers just pushed new code willy nilly to live production systems, because that's just stupid.
Nursie 14y ago

VLM 14y ago

"i walk in at 9.08am and you're going to moan at me for it" If they have a formal written policy that on paper you're fired after being documented as arriving late 3 times, and traffic / weather / commute / home life means you'll be late about once a quarter that means you'll only get to work there 9 months before the sword of Damocles is permanently hanging over you. This can be kind of a hint about what the workplace environment is really like. Another hilarious one is "can I work from home" "no" "oh cool no pager duty or on call" "well wait a second, I just meant you can't work from home 9-5". If your boss does trust you to work at 2am but not at 2pm when at home, its just kinda weird.

drewcoo 14y ago

Asking about tools is kosher in non-contracting gigs, too. If you can't have your box like you like it then just walk away. There are too many open positions everywhere now to even bother moving forward in an interview unless you know you're going to be productive. "Relaxed" is a lot more subjective . . .