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Developer interviews are different than most other places, because not only do you worry about the people you work with, benefits, job description, etc., you also have EXTRA to worry about after getting the job. Writing two application with exact requirements can be vastly different if you're working in a loud vs quiet environment, using VS2003/.NET 2.0 vs VS210/.NET 4.0., using SVN vs VSS.

Is it ok to give the potential employer the straight-up Joel Test? I try to ask as many questions to get the type of environment I will be working in, which is extremely important from my perspective, but what's the best way to cut to the chase and just ask the tough questions (like they ask you during the same interview).

NOTE: By the "Joel Test" I mean a specific list of things that are deal breakers that are important to you (not necessarily Joel), but you may not have time to get out using the traditional casual "conversational" way of asking them, so you decide to either email or schedule another meeting, or ask other people, etc.

gnat
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Ryan Hayes
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5 Answers5

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A job interview goes both ways -- a company is interviewing you and you are interviewing the company. I wouldn't come out literally with a "what's your Joel Test score?", but I would ask the individual questions that were particular deal-breakers for me in a work environment.

It doesn't need a huge build-up. A good time to ask these questions as at the technical part of the interview process, when they say "do you have any questions for us?". You can lead in with something along the lines of "can you describe a typical day on the job here?" and go from there.

Adam Lear
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Is the Joel Test your device to gauge how good a potential employer is?

I went for a job interview and the office was open plan thus noisy, had lots of disparate systems, a bug backlog, they didn't use many commercial tools, there were no testers, we wrote no code during the interview and no hallway usability.

..but you could take your dog to the office, you got one day a week to work on your own projects, there was 24x7 food with awesome Sushi, chill-out areas, a slide to get down stairs, free coke/coffee/OJ, and they make some of the most amazing software on earth.

It scored low on the Joel test, as far as I could see, but would you turn down working for this employer# based on this?

If it's noisy - you can put headphones on. If there's no testing, champion unit and/or automated testing. If there's no nightly builds, write a cron job or get CI installed somewhere.

By all means, use the Joel test as a guide to what questions you might want to ask, but there are lots of other metrics, some which may matter more to you than others.

(No prizes for guessing who the employer was!)

JBRWilkinson
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I've never worked at a place that scored higher than a 4 on the Joel test. When I go, I have a small packet I bring with me which includes another copy of my resume (I've come across recruiters putting my name on top of someone else's resume) as well as a bunch of questions, some of which were the joel test shuffled around. No one ever mentioned that they recognized the questions.

Tangurena
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The Joel Test inspired me to ask questions 'like that'. What version control, bug tracking, testing, ...

I usually ask a ton of questions at the end of (or during) the interview. If anything, it shows you're interested in best practices/quality assurance/.... If they don't do those things already, maybe they will be interested in you implementing eg: unit testing.

Best case scenario: they haven't thought about those things already, but they're amazed at what you can improve in their development process.

Worst case scenario: they dislike the fact you're asking so many questions, thus have no interest in improving their process, in which case you probably don't want to work there.

PS: just make sure you know what you're talking about, not just mindlessly walking over some list.

koenmetsu
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I have 3 questions about the development environment for which a negative answer to any one is a show stopper.

What version control software do you use?

What issue/bug tracker do you use?

Does your development process resemble Scrum?