Bruce Eckel has posted a short post on 7 questions to ask an interviewer:

1. If I want to buy something like a book or a tool, how does the process work (how hard is it?). What’s the cost limit before the approval must go up the management chain?

In my group the process is simple, if it might make you more productive and costs $500 or less we’ll just order it. If it’s a bit more you might need to make a bit of an argument for it. And books, well if you need them we’ll order it today. The signature limit for a line manager in our shop is a few thousand dollars.

1. What’s the noise level like during the day?

Fairly normal corporate shop with cubicles. Noise abatement comes down to coming in a little early, staying a little late, and probably wearing headphones some of the time. We’re moving to a new building so things may improve.

1. How many meetings am I expected to attend, and how long do they usually last?

One 30 minute or less team meeting per week. A one-on-one meeting for 30 minutes per week. Probably a daily standup 15 minutes per day on your project plus a full planning day once every 30 days. Plus any meeting you agree to as a team on that project. Anything other than that is an exception. I can’t protect my developers from an occasional ‘All Hands’ meeting or HR session, but I will push back to not have them attend no value meetings.

So for an average developer on a Scrum project a total of 2.25 hours of meetings per week.

1. Is there a dress code?

Yes, business casual with the typical Friday more casual. Your manager will probably always wear a tie, but that’s how you can tell him apart.

1. Can I work from home sometimes?

Certainly, but we do believe in collaboration so you can’t hide out at home.

1. Does it matter when I work, as long as I come to meetings?

Nope, if you can get your work done and make meetings you can work all the odd hours you want.

1. How many projects have succeeded/failed in the last five years? To what do you attribute the failures?

Maybe 50 successful projects and two big death march failures. The death marches both started out with almost no requirements, then a overly complex architecture was setup to solve the poorly defined problem. So the failures were both a lack of requirements or decisions on what the client wanted and an over-engineered solution. Adopting Scrum especially for high profile large projects makes this possibility much less likely going forward, but no promises.

One of our developers came across a strange fix to an error message we kept getting in Websphere Portal Search 5.1.0.3. The error message was along the lines:

You might try adding a little known property to portal search:

The parameter is supposed to set the maximum size of any page that it will search. It defaults to a measly 0.2MB. You would think that the portal server would just truncate anything longer, but maybe not. Anyway some badly designed HTML can climb over 200K pretty easily especially something generated by an application with lots of results. Speculation is that maybe large pages cause problems with the spider.

Anyway worth a try if you’re beating your head against the wall with this strange error. It worked in our shop even if it isn’t totally logical.

One of the small podcast I’ve followed for at least a year now is Python 411. I haven’t actually coded in Python for years, but the host, Ron Stephens is just so excited about the topic that I still find I enjoy it. Passion is important.

My python story is simple, I picked it up around 1997 or 1998 specifically because Google was using it and I thought at the time they looked like a great company to work for. Unfortunately I never moved to the Bay area and pursued it before I had a whole family to consider. Professionally I used python for some customization work with Infoseek’s UltraSeek product.

When ideas become dogma:

In Agile, the developers have to sit at the end of the row along the open hallway when everyone’s collocated. The business analysts have to be in the middle because they have to communicate with everyone.

In other words there’s a seating chart for an Agile team area. Or,

Sprints are always 30 days. It doesn’t matter if the product owner and the Scrum Master and half the team isn’t available, you can’t add a day to the project. That isn’t Agile.

And I thought the principal was responding a change over following a plan.

It’s almost always good to bring food to a meeting, particularly a longer planning type meeting, and I suck at it. The last time I brought food was to a TDD seminar I ran and I managed to bring peanut M&Ms and two people in the training session were allergic to peanuts.

I used to be better about this when I worked in consulting shops. Consulting shops never had issues with providing food and expensing it, especially for client meetings. Working inside a traditional company we have zero expenses for this and even the minor project celebration budget we used to have got slashed a while back in some silly budget cutting measure.

Not much of an excuse though, bagels or small candies are pretty cheap for the overall effect.