Questions I Will Remember (Next Time)
At each company I have worked for, there are things I wish I had known about before accepting.
You can't anticipate every thing that you might not be happy with, but I find the ones that really frustrate me are related to culture and process, and those are always easy to find out about. Nearly everyone (self included) thinks their development process is not too shabby and is happy to tell you all about it. And without necessarily criticizing any particular process, I have realized that I get unhappy working in an environment where there is a bias against unit testing, bug tracking, revision control, written specifications, comparing what you are doing with what others have done (especially in the context of framework/utility code - if you're reinventing a wheel, make sure it's a damn good wheel by copying the best features of every other wheel), or rewriting code again and again until its actually good rather than stopping after it "works".
The next time I'm looking at companies to work with, I will ask the questions I've "discovered" so far (the above paragraph giving a good sense of what I ask about), but upon starting I realize there were others that I should have asked. I can only hope that over time my list will grow to the point that I can accept an offer and not find myself surprised and frustrated later on by some broken process that I can't do anything to fix. Either that or I can just bite the bullet, do a startup, and avoid this problem entirely. That seems like a better solution (I might go bankrupt, but at least I'll have fun, which on the balance is what I'm looking for).
Posted 2007/09/07 in programming; no comments
< All Programs Are Inefficient | I Must Admit I Don't Quite Understand the Thought Process >