When I was looking for a job over a year ago I had a list of questions for tech recruiters about the company’s work environment, some of which seemed to catch them off-guard. I continue to refine these questions as I discover what environments I work best in.
These may or may not match things you care about, but perhaps they’ll spark some ideas on what is important to you.
What workstation hardware is provided and is that flexible?
If you’re a Mac aficionado and they stick you with a Windows box, are you going to be happy? If you are use to working with a laptop but they only provide desktops, is that OK? What if you function best with both, is that an option? How many monitors are provided and how big are they? You’re going to be spending hours and hours in front of whatever they give you, so make sure it’s something you want, they’re flexible in getting you want you want, or they’re at least OK with you bringing your own hardware.
Do you provide standing desks?
I’ve used a standing desk for 6 years now and couldn’t go back to sitting down all day. If this is something important to you, ask.
Do you have an open floor plan, cubicles, or offices?
Spaceflight is the first company I’ve ever worked in with an open floor plan and I hate it. It’s loud and disruptive. In the future this is going to be one of the factors I consider when looking for something else.
Can I access my personal email?
Shockingly, some companies block IMAP/POP3/SMTP and/or webmail sites for their employees, preventing them from using their personal email. Yes, you really have to ask this question.
Do you have a man-in-the-middle for HTTPS requests?
This question blew recruiters away. They couldn’t believe that a company would distrust their employees enough to snoop on their secure traffic for banking and other things. Except this is exactly what EMC did to their employees. All corporate-provided systems included an EMC CA. Their snooping appliance used that CA to sign certs provided to your browser every time it made an HTTPS request. For those of us in engineering who installed their Linux OS from scratch on Day 1 and didn’t have it, the web browsers would rightfully complain loudly that the certs were invalid and your traffic was being snooped on. Chrome would go so far as to refuse to connect to Google services when presented with a cert that wasn’t signed by a Google CA.
Can I bring and use my personal devices?
What is the official company policy on bringing and using your personal devices (laptops, tablets, cell phone) while at work? Can you work from the devices?
What is your work-from-home policy?
Are employees allowed to periodically work from home? Does the company provide adequate resources to make that possible?
What is the real vacation policy?
I’m way too old to start a job with just 2 weeks of vacation. Sorry, not going to happen. If the company refuses to budge, ask if they are OK with unpaid leave. On the flip side, if the company policy is “unlimited vacation”, what does this really mean in practice? Because if you give me unlimited vacation I’m likely to take a 4-6 weeks worth of vacation over the course of a year, usually in one or two day increments, while still making sure my work is getting done and my team is taken care of. If that’s not OK I need to know up front.
Where is the office located and are there existing plans to move?
Long commutes do not fit into my work-life balance and I will not work for an employer where I have to waste 2 hours of my day getting to and from work. For instance, I live in Seattle and will not take a job on the east side (that might change when the light rail gets completed, we’ll see). Knowing where the company is located is important to me. Knowing if there are existing plans to move the company is equally important.
These are just a small set of the questions to think about (I covered some more in my Dear Recruiter post two years ago) but don’t hesitate to ask them. We spent an exorbitant amount of our lives at work and we need to be happy there too.
Digital Ramblings 
These are all good questions to ask! I hadn’t thought of the hardware question.
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“Do your senior managers/execs send email late at night or on the weekends? Do they expect an answer outside of business hours?”
When I go home for the day or the weekend, I deliberately refrain from checking mail unless there is an ongoing event/crisis/investigation that I need to be updated on. If an exec sends me mail on a Saturday night and expects me to respond before Monday morning, that’s a problem.
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Agreed, and an excellent addition to the list although I would expand it to include all managers. I very purposefully don’t have my work email on my phone and have Slack set to not send me work messages after work hours. Being able to leave work at work is an important part of my work-life balance.
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And apparently you might want to add “Drug Tests” to the list.
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Ummm, wow. Yeah, would have never expected that one from a software company.
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Yeah, it’s totally silly. Drug testing was in EMC’s standard employee contract.
I think you’d have some difficulty enforcing it in a west coast tech hub where employees have many other employers available. We tend to think of east coast tech companies as stodgier, but all of the east coast people I’ve met use a lot of drugs. And they have plenty of employer options too. It might be easier to enforce in other parts of the country with fewer employers.
My biggest employee contract complaints / terms to watch out for are: (1) non-competition clauses. These shouldn’t be applied to every little IC employee, just senior management or perhaps extremely senior members of engineering staff. They’re illegal in California, but not Washington. And: (2) employer ownership of all off-hours employee output.
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