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[Topics to discuss with a new employer]

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Tags: #jobs #culture #questions

Topics to discuss with a new employer.md

Questions to ask yourself?

• What’s important to me (what are my priorities and standards)?
• What impact can I have here?

Questions for them?

It’s a good idea, at the start of any conversation, to ask:

What’s the focus of today’s conversation?

i.e. What’s important to <COMPANY>, and what insights do you want to take from this?

• What’s <COMPANY>’s story?

  • Give me an insight into the company’s history/background and how we’ve reached this point in time.

• Presence

  • How many offices do you have and what are their locality?

• Culture and Diversity

  • The company’s “values” will help indicate what’s important to them.

• Hierarchy and Organisation Structure

  • Are you fairly ‘flat and lean’ or ‘tall and fragmented’?

• Visibility & Openness

  • How does leadership share and handle critical/internal business topics?

• Collaboration

  • Features across teams (avoiding duplication)
  • Timezones

• Community

  • How do internal & external staff interact?
  • How do teams across offices/locality bond?

• Process

  • New Features
  • Leadership
  • Documentation (sharing of information, no silos of knowledge)
  • Post mortems (blameless retrospection, handling of failures)
  • Tech Debt

• Communication

  • SBI: Situation, Behaviour, Impact (Methodology, The Center for Creative Leadership)
  • Radical Candor (Book, Kim Scott)
  • Conscious Business (Video, Fred Kofman)
  • Authentic Communication (Book, Fred Kofman)

• Responsibility and Ownership

  • Site Reliability
  • Operations
  • On-call rota

• Job Progression & Opportunities

  • Learning budgets?
  • Conferences?

• Remote Working

  • How are remotes kept feeling inclusiveness?

• Work life balance and support

  • How do staff balance work-life, when in a multi-region organisation?
  • e.g. cross-over hours between UK and US?

• Tech

  • Infrastructure
  • Build System
  • Deployment Platform
  • Rollback Processes

• Vision and Future

  • Where is <COMPANY> looking towards?
  • What are the goals?