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Great article! I usually work at BigCorps. One problem I have is that they send the exceptional workers to interview me (and other candidates), but once I sta

by anon987 11y ago

Great article! I usually work at BigCorps. One problem I have is that they send the exceptional workers to interview me (and other candidates), but once I start I find out I'm working with a bunch of duds. How can I get a big picture view of (almost) all of the people I will be working with along with their skill levels? I don't expect everyone in the company to be all A team or B team tier, but I don't want to be a part of an organization where 80% of the people are barley qualified to do their job.

angelbob 11y ago
Start by asking, "who would my manager be?" or "who would my team be?" If you're not being interviewed by anybody who will be on your prospective team, that's already a red flag. You should be talking to your future coworkers (and maybe others, sure) and you should know which ones they are.
- anon987 11y ago
  Oh I understand that. To be more precise: Let's say I will be working on a team of 5 people. They send the manager and the smartest guy and things look great, but how do I gauge the skill level of the people who aren't there along with the skill level of other teams. For example, maybe my team is great, but I'll be working with other teams (infra guys, networking guys, legacy systems guys, whatever) who are obstructive and unskilled. How do you get outside the "interview box" to see more of the company?
  - RogerL 11y ago
    "Show me the code base" Haven't tried that, not sure how it would go over, but I feel pretty reluctant to go somewhere new without getting that chance.
  - hga 11y ago
    Judging the other teams is going to be more difficult, but for your boss and teammates, at some point in the process before you accept the job offer, say you want to spend a little time with them. Some combination of luck and observation, and/or good social skills, might elucidate how the team's interactions go with other teams. As mentioned above, a refusal to do this is a huge red flag. Even for a company like Google, which routinely does this. There are a zillion horror stories resulting from their closed allocation policy, like the hardware guy who was given a job doing vaguely hardware related Python programming. Without the option of moving to another team for 18 months per Google's policy (de facto if not de jure), he had no choice but to quickly resign to avoid ruining his career. And I should mention what happened in my last job, where I wasn't able to do that, and the boss I was assigned to, who had absolutely no buy in, he wasn't given a choice about my working for him, took an instant dislike to me. That did not end well. Echoing the theme of this subthread, for my last N jobs, in all but one recruitment I was substantially lied to. The one before that said I'd get enough time to review the org's long abandoned legacy software before a very firm (government contract) commitment to how long it would take to make it viable again. Before that, the manager didn't reveal she'd taken an offer to move to a subsidiary that was splitting off. She guilelessly told me that the previous attempt to hire someone in my position failed because she'd mentioned that. That job ended when The company before that had a pattern of hiring a "second" techie only after the current one had given notice, without telling prospects they'd soon be responsible for it all. Two before that I learned later that my boss didn't want to hire me, but I was the only one who passed his whiteboard programming test (which for me was so easy I hardly remembered it by that time) and the company would have otherwise died, and I was fired as soon as they convinced the guy they really wanted to move from SV back to the D.C. area. Before that, I joined a company just as a couple of devil investors took it over with what we soon enough learned was the express intent of owning all the company; they deliberately sabotaged the launch just to have 100% of nothing (granted, this was investor betrayal, in the denouncement 13 of us simultaneously resigned). Before that, no bad faith can remember, at least starting out, and those jobs and organizations were substantially more successful. If this sort of thing has indeed become a pattern, we shouldn't be surprised by general economic stagnation, whatever the other secular causes there might be.
  - matt_s 11y ago
    One good gauge of a question would be: "how long does it take to get a new VM?" "And how long before the team has software installed?" This will hint at the bureaucracy behind the scenes if they answer honestly. The only other way is to know people either on those teams or that have worked with those folks before and essentially do "reference checks" but in reverse on your prospective employer.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Internships actually do a better job here. Some BigCorps are treating summer college student jobs as a 90-day interview process. When done right, the student works with an actual team on an actual product. Everybody gets a good, long look at one another.
- coldcode 11y ago
  I worked at a company that took 90 interns per summer. All of them outside of our mobile team did nothing but fake intern projects. We made ours do actual product work that shipped; the rest of the interns were very jealous. We made offers to three and one accepted, the other two went on to graduate degrees.
  - alistairSH 11y ago
    How are those "fake projects" not a gigantic waste of everybody's time? We put our interns to work - either embedded on product teams, or working with our architecture/R&D teams on new technology. I think the interns generally enjoy the experience and we try to hire the best of them back after graduation.
    - s73v3r 11y ago
      They still allow you to judge the capability of those working on them. And in the US at least, you're not supposed to have interns working on something you'd otherwise have a regular, full time employee on. The whole keeping companies from replacing employees with cheap interns thing.
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        To the extent that approximates a real restriction, it applies specifically to unpaid interns.
        coldcode 11y ago
        The company paid the interns, even the ones that did nothing all that useful.
buckbova 11y ago
Typical 80/20 split exists at most companies. It's rare when you get a team of qualified motivated people together working towards a goal. But when you do, harness it, because it'll be gone before you know it.

by anon987 11y ago

angelbob 11y ago

Start by asking, "who would my manager be?" or "who would my team be?" If you're not being interviewed by anybody who will be on your prospective team, that's already a red flag. You should be talking to your future coworkers (and maybe others, sure) and you should know which ones they are.

anon987 11y ago
Oh I understand that. To be more precise: Let's say I will be working on a team of 5 people. They send the manager and the smartest guy and things look great, but how do I gauge the skill level of the people who aren't there along with the skill level of other teams. For example, maybe my team is great, but I'll be working with other teams (infra guys, networking guys, legacy systems guys, whatever) who are obstructive and unskilled. How do you get outside the "interview box" to see more of the company?
- RogerL 11y ago
  "Show me the code base" Haven't tried that, not sure how it would go over, but I feel pretty reluctant to go somewhere new without getting that chance.
- hga 11y ago
  Judging the other teams is going to be more difficult, but for your boss and teammates, at some point in the process before you accept the job offer, say you want to spend a little time with them. Some combination of luck and observation, and/or good social skills, might elucidate how the team's interactions go with other teams. As mentioned above, a refusal to do this is a huge red flag. Even for a company like Google, which routinely does this. There are a zillion horror stories resulting from their closed allocation policy, like the hardware guy who was given a job doing vaguely hardware related Python programming. Without the option of moving to another team for 18 months per Google's policy (de facto if not de jure), he had no choice but to quickly resign to avoid ruining his career. And I should mention what happened in my last job, where I wasn't able to do that, and the boss I was assigned to, who had absolutely no buy in, he wasn't given a choice about my working for him, took an instant dislike to me. That did not end well. Echoing the theme of this subthread, for my last N jobs, in all but one recruitment I was substantially lied to. The one before that said I'd get enough time to review the org's long abandoned legacy software before a very firm (government contract) commitment to how long it would take to make it viable again. Before that, the manager didn't reveal she'd taken an offer to move to a subsidiary that was splitting off. She guilelessly told me that the previous attempt to hire someone in my position failed because she'd mentioned that. That job ended when The company before that had a pattern of hiring a "second" techie only after the current one had given notice, without telling prospects they'd soon be responsible for it all. Two before that I learned later that my boss didn't want to hire me, but I was the only one who passed his whiteboard programming test (which for me was so easy I hardly remembered it by that time) and the company would have otherwise died, and I was fired as soon as they convinced the guy they really wanted to move from SV back to the D.C. area. Before that, I joined a company just as a couple of devil investors took it over with what we soon enough learned was the express intent of owning all the company; they deliberately sabotaged the launch just to have 100% of nothing (granted, this was investor betrayal, in the denouncement 13 of us simultaneously resigned). Before that, no bad faith can remember, at least starting out, and those jobs and organizations were substantially more successful. If this sort of thing has indeed become a pattern, we shouldn't be surprised by general economic stagnation, whatever the other secular causes there might be.
- matt_s 11y ago
  One good gauge of a question would be: "how long does it take to get a new VM?" "And how long before the team has software installed?" This will hint at the bureaucracy behind the scenes if they answer honestly. The only other way is to know people either on those teams or that have worked with those folks before and essentially do "reference checks" but in reverse on your prospective employer.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Internships actually do a better job here. Some BigCorps are treating summer college student jobs as a 90-day interview process. When done right, the student works with an actual team on an actual product. Everybody gets a good, long look at one another.

coldcode 11y ago
I worked at a company that took 90 interns per summer. All of them outside of our mobile team did nothing but fake intern projects. We made ours do actual product work that shipped; the rest of the interns were very jealous. We made offers to three and one accepted, the other two went on to graduate degrees.
- alistairSH 11y ago
  How are those "fake projects" not a gigantic waste of everybody's time? We put our interns to work - either embedded on product teams, or working with our architecture/R&D teams on new technology. I think the interns generally enjoy the experience and we try to hire the best of them back after graduation.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    They still allow you to judge the capability of those working on them. And in the US at least, you're not supposed to have interns working on something you'd otherwise have a regular, full time employee on. The whole keeping companies from replacing employees with cheap interns thing.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      To the extent that approximates a real restriction, it applies specifically to unpaid interns.
      - coldcode 11y ago
        The company paid the interns, even the ones that did nothing all that useful.

buckbova 11y ago

Typical 80/20 split exists at most companies. It's rare when you get a team of qualified motivated people together working towards a goal. But when you do, harness it, because it'll be gone before you know it.