In my company, we have a designer that insisted to have an Apple display. She got it, but it gaves many headaches to another guy to put it working linked to a normal PC (VGA to DVI converters, software costumization, etc).

She says that she can see more colours and more detailed colour in hoe monitors. As a non designer, I don’t see difference and dislike her monitor very much because it is very reflexive.

Can she be a tetrachromat?

Some kind of automated and periodic build process – at the very least. Continuous integration is good and preferable, but at least the code should be built periodically, preferably at least once a night.

Employers often want to look at your code. How about looking at theirs? You can tell a lot about a dev team by their code. If their code looks like a nightmare, then not only will you have to deal with that nightmare, it is unlikely that they will accept the need to write well designed code. I learned this the hard way.

Those three flags would have saved me a lot of grief – especially the last one; the head of the dev team insisted on writing most of the code, but could not code his way out of a paper bag. I have seen better code written by people right out of college with no experience whatsoever. Every single bit of his code sucked.

Ask to see the NDA and employment contract/agreement/rules up front. Don’t wait until the first day of work to learn that the employer expects to own your first born and that you will be on call 24/7 for years. Run if they won’t show them to you.

I agree about turnover – really hard to tell sometimes, but worth asking about. If the answer seems dodgy then keep looking – elsewhere. This too I should have noticed. Not just if there are many ex employees, but how long did they stay with the company?

OTOH, if they say “we have doubled in size” or “we are going to double in size” in the last months or year, then that signals explosive and usually unwarranted growth in personnel. Ramping up should usually be gradual and linear, not exponential. Explosive growth usually signals explosive failure.

As for asking about the financials of a company – it is appropriate to ask about this in general; is the company profitable? Is it running on venture capital? I have never had an employer be offended by this and they have always been fairly straight-forward. Profitable or now, startup or not, job security is sometimes more a matter of luck than whether the company is stable/profitable. I went to work for a very profitable large concern and one month in they had a hiring freeze, a month later a layoff, two months after that they had a major purge – none of it was necessary, it just was a matter of timing and power plays – most of which caught a lot of people by surprise. I survived it all but left anyway.

Do they have a SDLC process? No? Why not? If they do then how would they characterize the process? Waterfall? Agile? Somewhere in between?

Unit testing? Do they have a QA/testing process? Do they have a staging/test system or do they just throw the results of an iteration out on the production system and call it good?

Talk with them about popular frameworks you know and/or prefer. Does the team think the frameworks are good or bad? Why? One flag I have run into several times is the team doesn’t understand the framework, or they think it is too hard to learn (I am not particularly smart, so if I can understand something they should be able to also – and I prefer to work with people at least as smart and preferably smarter than me). Another similar flag I have seen is if they are misusing a framework in a way that seems to be kludgy or very odd. Did they reinvent the wheel because they didn’t understand how to use an existing wheel? I went to an interview where the senior devs created their own IOC/DI framework because they thought Spring was too hard to understand/use and I have seen similar homegrown frameworks at other orgs.

Glad I have meaningful technical experience ;-)

“(…) and software projects should be lead by people that have been (and, preferably, still are) skilled developers themselves”

100 % ACK.

Once you have worked with more then one screen it’s very hard to go back.

If the company business is not primary IT sometimes it can be very hard making them understand why you need certain kit and your more likely to get hand me downs.

It almost got to the point where I purchased my own screens.

And just because it’s a large company don’t expect the best kit they are often the worst.

* What about the overall professional behaviour of the company representatives?
* What about the products they are selling – are they really decent?
* What about the education budget?
* What about additional benfits of the job and your new position?
* What about the number of vacation days they offer you?
* It is also very important to check out if you fit in the team and the company at all.

I can think of a lot of more important points that can influence your future in the new company.

Yes, definitely and (of course) only if you’re not developing Windows-only desktop applications.

One of the things that I do is study development environments before we hand it over to them, we do this regularly. The latest I have tried is Ubuntu, Fedora and Mac OS X, criteria is too long to post here in terms of productivity and usability Mac OS X still leads.

And no, Macs do not cost more, HP’s and Lenovo’s running Redhat turns out to be more expensive based on our local sources.

One entry point would be here:

http://www.humis.utah.edu/humis/docs/organization_951_1147817063.pdf

and

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/cue/publications/INTERACT2003-ProductivityLargeDisplays.pdf

in your last paragraph, you say :

“As shown in several studies, the easiest way to gain lots of productivity is two screens.”

could you give me pointers to theses studies ?

* If I want to buy something like a book or a tool, how does the process work (how hard is it?).
* What’s the cost limit before the approval must go up the management chain?
* What’s the noise level like during the day?
* How many meetings am I expected to attend, and how long do they usually last?
* Is there a dress code?
* Can I work from home sometimes?
* Does it matter when I work, as long as I come to meetings?
* How many projects have succeeded/failed in the last five years? To what do you attribute the failures?

It might be worth updating the original article to have a reference to The Joel Test (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html) mentioned by @Jatra.

“This is one sure way to get rejected for asking inappropriate questions. It’s also highly unlikely that you’ll be able to understand the answer, even if the interviewers are stupid enough to answer.”

If you inform yourself first, you surely understand the answer.

All companies I’ve interviewed with have answered this.

“A company’s financials are none of your business as an employee, let alone as prospective candidate.”

In my opinion it is my business if I need to find a new job in 3 months, especially if I give up my current job for a new one.

Shame on you Stephan for suggesting this!

This is one sure way to get rejected for asking inappropriate questions. It’s also highly unlikely that you’ll be able to understand the answer, even if the interviewers are stupid enough to answer.

A company’s financials are none of your business as an employee, let alone as prospective candidate. If you really want to get an idea of their financial stability, ask the less invasive “how stable are your finances, have you secured funds to keep me employed for a month, 6 months or a year?”. Even this approach will probably backfire, as it shows your need for stability, something they will never be able to promise you.

Stop pretending we live in a certain world and do something that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

I’ve told you the rational reasons why I think – and many software companies do think the same e.g. LinkedIn – MacOS is better for (web) software development.

Ad hominem attacks are a poor reply.

There’s a a few other red flags, such as:

* allowing non-developers to choose the tooling that developers use. developers should always choose their tools without exception.

* understanding their build system needs to be cared for, maintained and upgraded occasionally. Personally I find Ant a total PITA nowadays, I hate it and if a company was building on Ant they’d really have to give me a good reason to like them.

* using proprietary tools when open source ones will do the job (as they are usually better).

* as for computers, I refuse to develop on Windows machines, if they are committed to a Windows-only environment I won’t be taking that job. I prefer Macs personally but Linux or other Unix variants are just as OK.

What if you’re old and like to take risks? Are worthwhile journeys only for kids?

A minor “annoyance” on Day One turns into a daily grind and eventually torture over time.

“We work flex hours. Almost everybody comes in before 8 am.”

As I’ve said, if your willing to take the risk, go ahead. Intellisense? Did machine code for years only armed with an editor … it was fun, and it was crazy but I wouldn’t want to go back. Seriously.

But I still believe Macs are more efficient – if you’re willing to learn shell/Unix than Windows. And more efficient than Linux because of desktop applications. Nothing to do with fanboyism.

A company allowed me to see one of its developers. But the recruiter didn’t tell me that he was an external consultant ;-) and he didn’t present himself as such (i didn’t even ask). I discovered it the first day, i only saw him 1 day then he left.

Not all will be rosy – but that’s the way it is. You need to put everything they say into perspective.

“Bonus points for Macs.” – Why? Is it because they cost a lot more and would make you think that the company had a lot more money than they said they did.”

The main reason – just personally – is that Unix is the better programming enviroment compared to Windows. An no, Cygwin is not a solution. Macs combine Unix and applications like Office in a nice way, better than Linux.

Apple more expensive? I’ve lately researched the prices of PowerMacs versus Dell, 8 core machines cost nearly the same (Dell 10% cheaper). The same for laptops (Compared Lenovo, Dell & Apple)

“Also, I’ve been working for software firms and computer departments for 10 years and I have never had a PC like you describe there.”

The last 4 companies I’ve worked for, had this setups – adjusted for the year I’ve worked there.

“I agree that you should look out for ageing computers and broken looking CRTs, but not state-of-the art stuff that could easily beat Kasparov at chess.”

The companies I’ve worked for usually gave computers first to developers, and the older ones to others (marketing usually does not need quad core machines).

macs aren’t just better, especially if you are talking about desktop systems. if you are buying a big beefy desktop, you can get 2x+ the hardware and throw your favorite version of linux on there and be way ahead.

kind of fanboyish of you to say that.

So get off your high horses and see a small biz or startup as an opportunity. When good policies are lacking, you can take the initiative and straighten them out. You become the hero and a valuable part in its success. Unless, of course, you are too busy whining about coding in a text editor from the command line.

In late 2007 I went to an interview where part of the interview was in the form of a free discussion (a good sign, BTW). As the conversation progressed I made the comment that dynamic languages are rising and that static typing is certainly not the only the game in town. My remark was received with something close to contempt: “Come on. Do you really think that one can write serious apps in Ruby/Python/Javascript?”

It was at that very moment that I realized that I should not join them. I am not saying that they must use a dynamically typed languages. There are valid reasons for which a company may use a statically typed language. But, I do expect them to be aware of what is going outside. I do expect them to make educated arguments against Ruby/Python/JS. Saying that it is not suited for a serious app is narrow mindedness.