Comment by highlander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by highlander | Hacker News Reader

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.

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