Gang,
I've been thinking about what I should write about here and on my site to help devs get the jobs they want, but I wanna know what topics you're interested in.
So what are your biggest questions when it comes to getting a dev job?
And how have you solved them so far?
Top comments (6)
My biggest ones are about the engineering culture, the general culture and the respect to ones personal lives (do you still work of you leave the office, do they have high responsiveness expectations out of hours?).
Unfortunately, the recruitment material usually is marketing material and doesn't correspond to reality. So unless a glassdoor profile has serious information about that or you have inside info it is difficult to uncover them. Any tips here?
This is a big deal the longer you stay in the profession. I think looking at glassdoor is great, but they recently started censoring poor reviews.
So there are two other ways I use to find out the scoop.
For two I like to ask things like
There are more you can come up with, but the idea is keep the questions open and put them to thinking of actual experiences they've had. You'll learn a lot about the place, but it is always a gamble.
One good thing though is that in our profession you can bounce to another job pretty quick once you know how. You don't have to suffer a toxic workplace for long at all.
Those are great questions, thanks
Any tips to spot lying in the answer?
Hmm, I've never really given that too much thought.
I ask these questions to the dev managers and the peer developers who interview me. That cross-section helps me identify consistent messages or things that are way out of sync.
Also, most companies don't do any real preparation before they interview candidates, so when I ask these questions they don't have canned answers ready. They may not be completely forthright, but each person will expose parts of the whole truth. Especially the peer developers. They are usually thrown into an interview and don't have too much reason to cover things up.
Those are all the right pieces, but there are two things I'd suggest at this point.