

Job interviews go both ways  - tomh-
http://blog.indextank.com/1122/job-interviews-go-both-ways/

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kabdib
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could have been replaced by 1,000 lines of Perl, and some of the worst code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.

------
wccrawford
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.

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

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1437241/endoffile-in-c-
eo...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1437241/endoffile-in-c-eof)

------
georgieporgie
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.

