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Comment by cedsav | Hacker News Reader

Whoever was your boss should have taken responsibility. Someone gave you access to the production database instead of setting up a proper development and testing environment. For a company doing "millions" in revenues, it's odd that they wouldn't think of getting someone with a tiny bit of experience to manage the development team.

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We sell middleware to a number of customers with millions of dollars in revenue who don't have backups, don't have testbeds for rolling out to "dev" before pushing to "prod" and don't have someone with any expertise in managing their IT / infrastructure needs.

My experience is that this is the norm, not the exception.

Normal = OK.

Then perhaps "insane" is the word we're looking for, not "exceptional." Lack of sanity can be the norm, but that still doesn't make it desirable.

As a college student, this fucking horrifies me. Is there anyway I can guarantee I don't end up at someplace as unprofessional as this? I want to learn my first job not teach/lead.

An interview is a two way street. You too can ask questions, make sure you fit within the team, and that the job is to your liking. That is the time to ask and find out about anything that may be pertinent to your job.

Also, you have a choice of leaving if you don't like the job, and or don't find the practices in place to be any good, or you can fix them.

Ask about their development and staging process during the technical interview. Ask about how someone gets a piece of code into production (listen for mention of different environments).

The Joel Test stands the test of time: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

It doesn't cover every last thing, but a team following these practices is the kind of team you're looking for. Ask these questions at your interviews.

The interview advice here is excellent. Ask questions - in the current climate they're hunting you, not the other way around.

Additionally, start networking now. Get to know ace developers in your area, and you will start hearing about top-level development shops. Go to meetups and other events where strong developers are likely to gather (or really, developers who give a shit about proper engineering) and meet people there.

It's next to impossible to know, walking into an office building, whether the company is a fucked up joke or good at what it does - people will tell you.

Well you should certainly look for a team that gives you a good impression with their dev process.

But, things are not always perfect, even on great teams. Not saying its normal to destroy your production database! But even in good shops it's a constant challenge to stay organized and do great work. Look for a team that is at least trying to do great work, rather than a complacent team.

I think it's entirely fair to haul out the Joel Test and say you'd just like to hear how they handle those things.

I honestly think the test is a little out of date, but if they say, "Well, instead of X we're doing better thing Y", that's a great answer.

This. Because of this and the lack of backups.

Even worse, they didn't have a backup.

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