Binary Badass

One of the philosophies that I am adopting as a result of that talk is to go to a job interview outside of my current employer once a year. What made me think of this is one of the talks that I attended at Ohio Linuxfest 2008; namely the Managing Your Open Source Career talk. One thing that a lot of companies and job candidates seem to miss is that the job interview is not only for the company to determine whether the candidate is the right person for the job, but also whether the company is the right company for the candidate.

Read on for more.

All too often, when interviewers ask the following question, “Do you have any questions for me?”, the candidates are intimidated and don’t know what to ask, so they often reply, “No I don’t”. I admit I did the same thing during my job interview. It was all so surreal, sitting in the office of the biggest Internet company in the world being asked all kinds of questions to see what you’re made of. 11 months into it and adopting this new philosophy, I have determined that there are several questions that any new candidate should of their prospective employer. You basically flip the interview around so that now you are interviewing the company to see whether or not it is a good fit for you. Print this page out and take it with you; it could save you a lot of aggravation. You may not hear what you want to hear, but at least you’ll hear about it up front and not find it out down the line later.

1. What is the corporate culture like?
2. What metrics will I be evaluated on? How objective are those metrics? To what granularity will they be tracked?
3. How does the promotion process work? Is it a transparent process?
4. Who ultimately makes the decision to promote or not to promote?
5. How does a performance review work?
6. What will my day-to-day be like? Will it consist of project-based work or will it just be break/fix and putting out fires?
7. Will I be the only person performing this job function or will I be working with a team of people in the same physical location as me?
8. If I am not happy with what I am doing, can I easily change my job position/scope?
9. How much travel is involved?
10. What do you like about working here? (This is addressed to your interviewer.)
11. What do you dislike about working here? (This is addressed to your interviewer.)

Print this sheet out and take it with you to your next job interview. Got questions you think should be here? Put them in the comments section below and they may just end up on the site!