Anybody in the IT industry eventually hears about the
Joel Test.
I don't think that all of those things always apply to all IT jobs, but if you don't have most of them it is a pretty good sign there might be something wrong there.
There used to be an even better resource on a post on Stack Exchange that went about it from the other way, a list of red flags called the
Anti Joel Test (don't bother to click, like a lot of things these days Stack Exchange mod farmers have removed it after over a year of upvotes).
You can find some of the original contents in the internet archive if you care to look. The least difficult to read version seems to be the 2010 crawl.
Since I was using this like periodically in discussions and it is effectively dead, I thought it might be useful to preserve the main points here. This is more or less in the order it was in the archived version skipping some of the responses that were effectively jokes:
- Does the company insist on being very process heavy?
- Do you do your development work on the live production server?
- Do web filters block out forums making it difficult to research online?
- Is the work environment noisy making it difficult to concentrate?
- Is the work schedule an inflexible 8-5?
- Do they expect tier 1 support in addition to your programming duties?
- Does management have no true understanding of development?
- Despite this, does management "think" they know development?
- Do they fail to provide an outlet for being creative?
- Do they fail to provide adequate development hard/software?
- Do they deny developers admin rights to their own box?
- Is there a dress code which includes a suit and tie? (or other customer facing dress code req's)
- Is the chief technology officer an accountant?
- Do developers have to account for their time in small increments?
- Is refactoring discouraged?
- Is the development team driven and controlled by sales people?
- Do you usually promise to create the documentation after the software is finished?
- Do you hire cheap people because they cost less?
- Do you let inexperienced people create new products, but experienced people finish and maintain whatever is created?
- Are strategic alliances (instead of technical merits) the main argument for resp. against the use of a technology?
- Does your source control consist of physically backing up your source
tree into a source.backup.n directory every time you want to make too
many changes?
- Does management think that paying a consultant to teach on-site
classes is the most effective way for developers to learn a new
technology?
- Is there at least one case where a single person unilaterally
makes software architecture decisions for more than three simultaneous,
ongoing, non-trivial projects?
- Is the coding standard an inviolable straitjacket that serves to hinder rather than inform?
- Is StackOverflow blocked at work?
- Would management view time off to speak at a conference or other
technical gathering relevant to your work as suspicious and/or
unconditionally refuse it?
- Do developers feel frustrated or stymied by managerial/organizational problems more often than technical ones?
- You're required to use IE6 at work. And you do web development.
- Did the last developer you hired leave quickly? Usually high turnaround
in IT means at least one of two things: A) The code is wretched and
unmaintainable, and/or B) Management has highly unrealistic expectations
about programmers.
- Also: Does the team not care about learning new things, experimenting
with new technologies and at the very least check out what's "new" in
their programming world? If they are like this then it means the team
is a bunch of incompetent Morts and are mediocre at best.
- Is the primary development language an in-house only product?
- Do I need to work weekends just before a big release?
- Is access to the internet blocked at work?
- Are they inflexible about letting you work from home occasionally?
- Does the management do task effort estimation?
- Was it too easy for you to get an offer from the company? (All you had to do during the interview was to explain quicksort)
- Does the average developer have more than 3 hours of meetings a week?
- Are working hours strictly enforced? Am I supposed to work 9-5 daily with no exceptions?
- Do you only release a product if
there aren't any more known bugs?
- Is my manager non-technical?
- Are there more than 3 people who can
assign work to me without any
approval?
- Is the coding standard an inch thick?
- no coffee or crappy coffee indicates a lot. It says to me that a company would rather
do the bare minimum to pacify employees than to spend a bit more and
make them happy
-
Do you expect developers to serve support requests while doing project work?( Do you let the urgent override the important?)(without accounting for the time lost to project work)
- Are your developers unhappy?
- Do they hire developers primarily based on academic degrees?
- unpaid overtime a regular occurrence, and nothing is being done to change that
- rules set in stone, even if the programmer have a good reason to break them
- Do employees from multiple departments without an ownership stake in
technology make suggestions about programming techniques or
implementation details and expect to be taken seriously
- management judges projects by their costs only and are unable to judge them by their value earned
- Are developers regularly asked to complete numerous training
courses prescribed by management to tick some bigger company-wide goal
that is completely irrelevant to what developer is paid for
None of that list is really my ideas, but this is something I think about on and off since the unnecessary death spiral experience of one of my previous employers and enough time has passed I think I should be able to look at it a bit more objectively and learn something.
