I thought I knew the answers to these questions, but I feel at a loss to answer them now. I can list what I would have said in an interview years ago, but then I can hear myself criticizing my answer now before it even leaves my mouth.
For fun, let’s go through some typical answers you might give to “what do you want out of a job? “, and I’ll neurotically rebut them all.
I Love Autonomy At My Job
I’ve mentioned autonomy many times before in job interviews, and I think I was being sincere when I brought it up. I don’t know how I’d feel if I were ever at a job where I wasn’t granted some level of autonomy. At every developer position, I’ve been forced to use my brain to solve problems, and the requirements were always nebulous enough that I could make suggestions that ended up making their way into deployed code.
Wait…if I’ve never felt that I lacked autonomy at a job, is autonomy something I should be looking for in the first place?
And if you have complete autonomy at your job, does anyone care what you do? I mean, that kid over there playing “trucks” has complete autonomy over that sandbox, but no adult is going to hand him a web job because of it. Am I just as naive as that kid when I mention autonomy in the workplace? Sometimes I feel pretty close to the sandbox when a project I’m working on stalls.
When I think back on the jobs I’ve held over the last 8 years of being a web developer, the times when I had more autonomy were some of the worst periods for me as far as job satisfaction goes. If you are a one-person “R&D team” then you aren’t that much different from the kid playing around in a sandbox. You might feel good while working, but at the end of the day when you look up, no one is left to cheer on whatever new prototype you are building.
So…ouch. The best answer I could think of for the entirety of my job searches is now failing my barometer test.
I think too much autonomy can be a bad thing since your coworkers should care about what everyone works on. More attention/scrutiny means less autonomy but in a good way that keeps you more integrated with the team vs. being a lone wolf.
Instead, you should work towards asking questions about stakeholder engagement and providing value to your project. Within answers to those questions, you’ll find out how the group manages a project, when the developer gets involved, and ultimately how much autonomy you’ll be given on the job without having to ask that specific question.
I Want To Work For An Employer Who Cares About Open Source
I used to say this a lot too. I wanted to make sure…well ask at least…that the company I worked for invested in open source. I try to blog and help out with OSS when I can, but at this point, I can’t say I really contribute to any one project.
But what does “10% time” amount to anyway, and if your company uses OSS and fixing code is part of your job, then the lines will blur. Plus, if a company does sponsor OSS, then you’ll probably be working on those repositories vs. your own pet project.
And if the company nods to “providing 10% time” but you don’t see that put into practice by anyone, are you really going to cry foul when there’s still work to be done on the highest priority project? Just like “unlimited PTO”, I think time to work on OSS can be a risky thing to trust in a job posting as far as feeling comfortable taking full advantage of the perk.
Instead, you should actually start working in an open source project you use, and you’ll naturally find out where other developers working on the project are employed and how favorable they view their employer.
I Want To Work In A Larger Team Where I Have More Support
This is a legitimate desire of mine after working in teams where a few people leaving meant the collapse of whole projects. In such small dev teams, I could never feel a sense of respect from my majority non-dev coworkers…especially when they were asking “did you fix it yet?”
But if you don’t even have context of what it’s like to work in a company with hundreds or thousands of developers, how can you know it’s a good idea to jump into that environment? I must use this saying all the time for a reason:
Better the devil you know then the devil you don’t.
Instead, try and befriend someone who works in a larger company and form a correspondence. Buy them lunch or coffee, have a Zoom chat, or go to any event that company puts on. You can find out a lot about the company before you start applying for one of their jobs.