Asking the right questions to gauge the kind of work I'll be doing at a 50 people startup.

Apple
samskeyti

Go to company page Apple

samskeyti
Jul 15, 2021 10 Comments

(8 YOE, Senior engineer). I really enjoyed my interviews with this company, the people were great and the mission as well (I'd rather not name it).

In my various interactions, I could see that they had smallish engineering team sizes, and didn't have a QE or a SiteOps/SRE dept, as is not unexpected at startups.

While I am privy to ops/devops work (I've dabbled with IaC - cloudformation, docker, containers, jenkins etc) and obviously realize the importance of it, I'd rather not have that be my day job. I've been at startups before and I realized that the more ops work we handled, the more management took us for granted and put off hiring an actual ops person skilled in those very aspects. We frequently found ourselves doing deployments, server maintenance and tackling fires. On top of that, half of the backend team conveniently skipped those responsibilities and it came onto me and a colleague.

My primary work at Apple has been backend engineering and designing systems and architectures, which I quite enjoy. I also get to work with product users directly. I'm doing fine here, yet wouldn't mind a move. I want to be sure of the work I'll be doing, and ask it in the right way.

Appreciate any advice. #interviewing

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TOP 10 Comments
  • New
    hugh jarse

    New

    hugh jarse
    the answer won’t be the truth so it doesn’t matter. expect to be oncall and firefighting a lot. hoping otherwise and trying to be sideways about it will get you nowhere. just ask directly, how many hours per week and how much oncall
    Jul 15, 2021 5
    • New
      hugh jarse

      New

      hugh jarse
      51
      Jul 19, 2021
    • Rebellion Defense
      dVKy15

      Rebellion Defense

      dVKy15
      200
      Sep 2, 2021
  • You got to know when to hold em
    Jul 15, 2021 0
  • Splunk
    xdJD40

    Go to company page Splunk

    xdJD40
    Build everything programmatically. Infra programming should be considered in the same bucket of work as product and backend features
    Jul 15, 2021 0
  • New / Eng
    donaldduk

    New Eng

    donaldduk
    TC?
    Jul 15, 2021 0
  • TC?
    Jul 15, 2021 0