Ask HN: What to ask to avoid corporate hell? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What to ask to avoid corporate hell?

11 pointschangingjobs8 comments

Hi all, I'm looking for some good questions I can ask at a job interview.

I know this is probably the opposite of what most people here want to do, but I work right now at a fairly small company (doing mostly development / deployment / have lots of this company and technology specific experience) and I'm going to an interview for a job in an international IT company who's logo you are likely to see somewhere around you right now. The destination position is in r&d / development.

After hearing a lot of good and bad things about big corporations, I really want to find some questions that I can ask in order to avoid a disaster. If you ever worked in such environment / know more about it, could you post some things I can ask and what kind of behaviour from their side says "run and don't look back"? I will have separate meetings with both a manager and with technical people. As far as I know, technical side is pretty decent (re. quality control and testing) and they're not treating people like slaves there (in that dept. at least ;) )

Any advice would be highly appreciated.

(for obvious reasons, this is a throw-away account and a pretty vague post...)

I don't know your definition of corporate hell but here are a few which might help: Q: What do you consider important when measuring performance of your engineers? Q: Can an engineer fix a bug without permission? Q: Do the dev teams have access to deploy their software to the production environment? Q: Can I download and install software to help me do my job? Q: What policies do you have in place if I want to use an open source library or framework in your system? Q: How often do your people work evenings and weekends? Q: Is there an on-call requirement? How does that work? Q: Can you describe the atmosphere? Is it fun? Is the department filled with laughter? Q: What are your views on hobby projects outside of work? What other cool things are people here involved in?

"Can I download and install software to help me do my job?" -- this is a great question, but will generally rule out most corporate gigs.

That is a great one. Many people don't think of it, but in many corp jobs something as simple as hey lets use git or subversion, stomp on so many cooperate policies that you can be summarily dismissed for doing so. If you can't install the software that you need in a timely manner run don't walk.

I remember I was at a company that was using a very old version of WASAD it was like 3 versions back. It took 1.5 years of fighting all the way to the top just to allow the developers to use Eclipse which was at 3 at the time. For those that cant recall Eclipse 3 was a major rewrite and WASAD was already on an old version of Eclipse so to be 3 version back on WASAD meant that you where around 5 versions back from where Eclipse was at. The crazy part about it was that I was a senior director, I was two positions in the org chart from the CIO, and my role reported directly to the CIO. So if it is that much of a fight for a senior director I imagine that it is futile from a developer to take up that fight.

I like the questions about allowed things at work / policy on hobby projects. Others might be useful too. Thanks a lot - that's exactly the kind of stuff I'm looking for.

Look for a healthy mix of new hires, long term members of the department, and people who have transferred into the department from other departments across all levels of the department. It is bad to wind up in a dead end branch of a large organization where there are only lifers and your skill set isn't valued by other departments.

Thanks. As far as I know they're collecting people for a new project and growing an almost-separate department, so it's definitely not a dead branch (unless the project fails that is...). It might be worth looking at the current leads / managers from that perspective though.

What I mean by "dead branch" is a department from which there is no mobility to elsewhere in the corporation because the skill set required and the experience gained within the department isn't transferable elsewhere in the organization - e.g. a ship's cook never rises to executive officer.

I wrote something longer, but I'll condense it to: I'd be very cautious of moving from development into a QC/testing role. Those roles are often treated as second-class citizens within a development environment. And even when development treats them well and allows them to really do their job, more general and senior management still sees them as second class citizens.

I'd ask for a detailed description of the types of work you will be doing, and seek your own self-assurance (whatever they tell you) that your development skills won't atrophy.

Moving from a QC/testing role to development can also be a hard sell. Don't get stuck/typecast.

I suspect that, the larger the organization, the more true a lot of this is. For one thing, QC/testing changes from being a few individual roles to its own entity, depending on the organizational structure.

If you can, spend some time networking with people in and about this kind of role. If you can make some safe connections to people at the potential employer, all the better. But also try to ascertain whether the move will have any negative career implications. (I'm just one introverted bloke, and my experience is likely biased.)

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