Ok, so you’re in an interview and their questions are finished and it’s time for them to answer yours.  So you start asking them different Qs about their shop.  You ask about servers, versions, support, team layout, upcoming projects, etc.  You cover all the bases and it all sounds pretty good.  You leave and an offer comes in a few days later and you accept. 

Fastforward to your 2nd week on the job and you’re starting to discover something.  All these people around you are idiots.  Not a single one of them really knows what’s going on and even worse you’ve heard a couple things that make you believe that all grand ideas the hiring manager had in your interview were just HIS grand ideas.  They’re things he’d really like to do.  As it turns out though, nobody else has neither the desire nor the skillset to make any of it happen. 

So what do you do now then?  You’ve saddled yourself to this new gig where you’re surrounded by morons and everything you came here for is now defunct and you know it.  Personally, I would probably start looking for another gig in a hurry.  The older I get the more I just can’t bear to work in those types of shops.  And I really wish that the interview process were such that you could tech screen the guys you’re supposed to be working with.  As it stands that kind of thing is presumptuous.  It would be considered pretty rude to come in and interview someone for their own job.  But what are you supposed to do?  Don’t you have the right to make sure you’re coming into a good shop too?  They don’t want to hire someone who’s an idiot, but certainly they can recognize that we don’t want to be put in that position either, right?  Well, I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m hoping that one day we can get to that point.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers other than to cut your losses and maybe get a little more clever about how you vet the next shop.  Maybe ask them Qs that are meant to see how they’re going to design something that they talked about and see if they know what they’re doing.  I’ve even flatout asked the hiring manager if the plans were just his or if there were an active project to make it happen.  You can also find out a little about their office politics by asking the right Qs, but you have to be sneaky.  Ask them about their top 5 support issues.  That’ll tell you a lot.  For example if one of their big issues is that they keep having unauthorized prod changes, then you know that they’ve got devs or end users in the DB.  So now you can ask them outright why those users have rights to prod.  Then you can ask what they’re doing to change it and what the roadblock is.  This can tell you a lot about the experience of the upper mgmt as well as the hiring mgr because based off of his answers you’ll know if he knows what he’s doing and if the company is too immature to keep their users under control. 

You can also ask them about their HADR.  Ask them what they’ve got in place and whether their happy with it.  Then you can ask what they’d do differently and why, etc.  This line of questioning can take you a long way in finding out things about the people you’re about to work with.  Maybe it’s a SQL group that’s pretty on the ball but when you ask why something is done the way it is you find out that the windows team is poor and blocks everything they try to do.

You can also ask the guy how he got started in the business and what his experience is.  I’ve asked hiring mgrs outright if they were technical or not.  The point is that while you can’t whip out your big list of Qs like if you were on the other side of the table, you can still find out quite a bit with a few well-placed questions.  The trick is to gear it toward something he said so it just sounds like you’re asking more info about the shop.  When what you’re really doing is finding out if these are the people you wanna work with.

Also, don’t fool yourself into thinking that if someone answers the Qs well that they’ll be good.  All the discussion boils down to is that they can at least talk the talk.  And I’ve met plenty of guys who can do that.  You get them in the interview and they say all the right things and really appear to know their job.  But when you get them in your shop they somehow can’t do the simplest things.  So this is no sure-fire way to vet your new team, but it’s all you’ve got. 

Another big point of this is to start you thinking in this direction.  You don’t have to just shut up and take what they give you.  Too often people are just so grateful to be offered something that they take the first offer they get no matter how bad the company is.  And then they sit there for years and put up with garbage every day.  But you don’t have to.  You’re (hopefully) a professional, which means you’re in demand.  You should be calling some of the shots.