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During a job interview, what are some less obvious signs that might suggest the workplace isn't a great environment (red flags)?

T Alex Beamish

@nixCraft
"We're really short-staffed right now."
"A new person is going to have to hit the ground running."
"A couple of key people have left recently, so we have to hire replacements fast."
"We've been too busy shipping code to worry too much about documentation."
"Sorry, we're in the middle of an incident right now."
"The code's self-documenting."

@talexb @nixCraft I'm also guilty of this in my own company when I was just starting out on my own. I asked a friend to pitch in for the remainder of a project to do some of the things mentioned above, document, etc. I said I didn't have much time to help him out, and he would need to "hit the ground running."

Needless to say he quit after a month, after telling me that I expected the impossible from him. Being knee-deep in the project for 6 months had led me to believe that it wasn't a heavy lift. It was, and I'm sorry about that

I wouldn't subject someone to that again

@webhat @nixCraft Yes -- I was explaining my Perl code to a client via screen share this afternoon, and I had to explain the database row is built using a data structure that's an array of hashes, and in some of the fields, the value is calculated by an anonymous subroutine that's passed in a payload structure. He's a bright lad, but I think it was a little outside his expertise.

This is a Perl script making API calls, building database rows that then get stuffed into an RDBMS. Not trivial.