coder . cl

Probably you get delighted by some very nice spots about companies which are hiring new developers, wonderful job posts where you can see that Big Company is hiring new developers or people related to software development. Did you know the type of company where are you applying for a job? Do you know that company enough to ensure that you will be happy?. You should have some points in your mind before you apply for certain jobs, also you must analyze very well where are you applying. Here I bring you some pointers about what you should have in mind once you apply for a job.

The very first task you should do, is to take a look to the CEO. Is the CEO someone that have enough knowledge about technology to drive the company in a friendly way?. I mean friendly by that kind of company where you do not receive weird requirements like “can you download Google into my pendrive?”. If it is a good company, you will not hear about unsolved issues like weird requirements like solving NP-Hard problems in one HTTP request with one server and using .NET, for example. No matter how big is a company, you can find the ugliest requirements in the biggest companies. Do you remember when the Telefonica Spain CEO did a conference where he was requesting a charge to Google because Google was using their network, with a high traffic?. Things like that only means that the CEO and people bellow are not able to understand how the Internet works.

The second thing to look forward is where do you will work. Do you know how is structured the office?. Once you get into the interview, watch how are placed all desktops, do they use cubicles?, do they use good chairs?, do they use good computers?, make sure that desktop will not stop you from communicating with other members of the development team, the chairs are good chairs and will not bring you a backache at the end of the day, also look forward if they have some plants, natural, green and good looking ones, just to be sure that you will not be looking concrete all day.

Probably you will be interviewed more than two times, by different bosses. Feel free to ask a hard technical question. Like a trap, just to know if the one that will be your boss is able to answer that question. If he lies and you catch him, probably will not be a good job, and they will request you something strange and inconsistent in the future. Also look forward if they treat their developers or employees as resources, feel sure that if they call them resources, you will be a mere wrench in a big software building machine.

Also ask if you will have access to tea and coffee for free. Everyone knows that people that drinks tea and coffee during his workday is more productive than people that doesn’t drinks. Ask if they have a terrace, garden or something similar, where you can go to think about hard programming problems or do a good break during project switching — on that case where you will be working in more than one project per day.

Finally, watch the kind of projects that they have. This is important if you want to improve your career, you must be sure that you will be working on projects where each problem that is assigned to you will not be a headache, for example refactoring code that was created by mediocre programmers. Usually on that kind of project, you will not be able to do much refactoring, because the change set will be major than the required functionality. Be sure that they are working with coding standards, architectures and well specified normative. Otherwise you can expect messy code and buggy software.

Good luck in your interview.