Re: Interview Counterattack: "Show me a project-plan"

Ask to see a current project-plan for an active development project. They should be able to walk right into the other room and just print one out from Microsoft Project or its equivalent. If not, ask:

Uh .. I don't necessarily agree with the whole "Everything's got to be in MS Project" concept. As long as management and developers are talking and there's agreement that things are moving in the right direction and targets are being met, things are fine.

Look the interviewer squarely in the eye and ask him or her how many times a year anyone has been required to work overtime. If the answer is a number greater than one, ask:

Yeah .. that may end the interview on a bit of a downer. If you've been on the operations side of software support, you know that unexpected things happen and overtime is required. It's probably better to ask an open question like "How do you deal with overtime?" or "How busy are you right now?" than it is to ask a closed question such as the one you suggest.

Overtime gets compensated -- my deal at $work[-2] was that I got double time off for a support call, so that a one hour call gave me two hours off, and if the call interrupted my sleep, I would just sleep in, have breakfast and get to work whenever I got to work; my employer was fine with that. If you're talking about development overtime, then I expect that, after the rush, the company would tell the developers to take a few days or a week off and go home and sleep.

But these days I can't believe that managers think they're going to get 50% more quality code done by getting their developers to work 50% longer hours. I think research has shown that after eight hours developers start to make mistakes, then have to spend time to fix those mistakes -- so you're not really any further ahead, and you may even be further behind if some of those mistakes were bad design decisions.

If you find yourself in such a hole, look for ways to inject organization and planning into the process any way that you can. Start by organizing yourself. Keep a diary and a time-log. Turn off the e-mail and check it only at 9, 12:30, and 4. Get a calendar scribble-pad for your desk and actually scribble. With practice it will begin to become habit, and sometimes habits spread (in a good way) to other people around you.

I started keeping a log book a few years back -- it was something my colleague Mike Stok did, and it's fantastic. Now when someone asks me something, I flip back in the book and read out the command I typed. That's way better than "Oh, I think I typed in ..". I can also pin-point, to day anyway, when I actually did something a few weeks or months back.

Some days I cover half a dozen pages with notes -- and those notes are extremely valuable. Without those notes I'd have to go ask some people questions that I asked them a month ago -- that's not professional, that's just plain dis-organized.

But if they don't... feed the monster, roll the dice. And next time around, ask those “awkward” questions!

I've also heard that personal connections, or networking, actually produce 60-70% of jobs, and the web sites that you mentioned work about 1% of the time. I put more faith into a site like LinkedIn myself. I found my last two jobs through personal connections -- it works for me.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

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Re^2: Interview Counterattack: "Show me a project-plan" by ww (Archbishop) on Apr 16, 2008 at 14:58 UTC
Good points, talexb; especially re the log and personal connections. Two minor nits (which is, I suppose, redundant, but I call it "emphatic" with the emphasis on "minor"): As I read the OP, the ref to M$ Project was more by way of example than a global requirement. (Heaven help us if it wasn't.) And re your "But these days I can't believe that managers think they're going to get 50% more quality code done by getting their developers to work 50% longer hours." Certainly some -- perhaps even "most" -- managers have learned that lesson, but to paraphrase a famous observation, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the managerial skills of some managers... but one may go broke by overestimating their willingness to buck their bosses." Certainly, some kind of "interview counterattack" to learn whether the manager is among the enlightened will have great value. Overall, though, a heartfelt "++"	[reply]
Re^3: Interview Counterattack: "Show me a project-plan" by talexb (Chancellor) on Apr 16, 2008 at 15:30 UTC
Regarding the MS Project reference, you're quite right -- although I detest this product, it's more because it's the embodiment of 'some guy wearing a suit, sitting in an office telling me what to do because of some damn chart'. When you get down to a GANTT chart that's down to the level of spending half a day writing one specific routine, that's the time to start a new career as a musician .. or something. Again, an opened ended question goes a long to probing gently about the employers attitude, in this case, towards developers doing overtime. The whole job interview thing is a conversation that's really a negotiation. You have to explore, question, examine, with the understanding that both sides want to get as much information from the other side as possible, so as to make a fully informed decision on whether This Is The One. Hearing someone describe a job interview as 'self-flagellation' tells me they're not comfortable in their own skin yet. Or maybe it's the jacket and tie -- hey, if you're not comfortable in it, ditch it and wear something comfortable. Think about it this way -- if you're going to wear a suit every day, then wear one to the interview. If not, not. I wore black jeans, nice shirt and sweater to my first interview at `$work[-1]` and I was probably the best-dressed in the room. I dressed down (ditched the sweater) for the second interview, and it was (as the kids say) all good. And thanks for the vote of confidence. ;) Alex / talexb / Toronto "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Interview Counterattack: "Show me a project-plan" by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Apr 24, 2008 at 14:59 UTC
I was making a tongue-in-cheek simile, of course. One of my early co-workers once said to me, “you can never go wrong in a light-pinstripe blue suit with polished shoes.” I don't personally dress-up much like a page from Vanity Fair, but when he did, he was right.
work practices: log books, notes files (was Re^2: Interview Counterattack: "Show me a project-plan") by doom (Deacon) on Apr 16, 2008 at 21:36 UTC
I started keeping a log book a few years back And I had a comment on that, but I decided I was wandering too far afield. Time for a new Mediation: Work practices: log books, notes files...	[reply]