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