Job interviews go both ways

Oh yes. A thousand times yes.

The one time I /needed/ a job, there was a Brass Ring job fair happening in San Jose; one of those affairs where you can (and I'm not kidding) smell the desperation and fear as too-well-dressed people tender their fancy (but essentially vacuous) resumes to harried booth staffers who ("please, dear Lord") just want to end their lives. If you've ever been on the booth side of one of these, you know what I mean.

I went to a booth belonging to a start-up I'd never heard of, presented my resume and mentioned that I had about 20 years experience doing C.

"Really?!" I've never actually seen someone's eyes light up with real light, but the guy I was talking to came really close. The interview the next day was a breeze and I was sitting in a cubical in a Mountain View start-up incubator (The Landings, natch, third time there) within a week. Nice to have a paycheck again.

But.

I won't bore you with the details, but this is where I learned the phrase "Train Wreck," from a guy who left two weeks after I came on board. Let's just make a list: Patterns, Cargo-Cult Programming, a product with 200K SLOC that could have been replaced by 1,000 lines of Perl, and some of the worst code I'd ever seen. Add to this a VC fight (the banks interviewed us worker-bees to try to figure out what was going wrong) and the execs bringing in a psychiatrist to interview the employees, ditto. When I quit, six months later, the prez broke down in tears, begging me to stay.

The interview goes both ways. Oh, yes.

Too right. I've been in on a lot of interviews, and only rarely has the person asked questions about the working conditions, the state of the development tools, and other relevant things. The people who did were either very good at their job, or troublemakers. Or both. lol

So when I went job hunting this year, I asked some of those questions. Not as many as I should have, but enough. I'm pretty pleased with the results.

The questions also tell the prospective employer things about you, as well. How much you know about a functional work environment, how likely you are to try to change internal processes, etc. It can be good or bad, depending on your attitude and questions.

In case anyone is interested, EOF in C is "out of band" in a sense.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1437241/endoffile-in-c-eo...

I've never really felt that I learned much of anything by asking questions of potential employers. It either got a rehearsed B.S. line, or I made them uncomfortable and they were less likely to then hire me.

I do, however, come away with very clear opinions of employers, but this is based entirely upon their behavior during the interview. Not focusing on my answers (one guy brought a laptop to the interview and browsed his email while I was talking), asking keyword trivia, or generally coming across as a prick means I definitely don't want to work there.