When switching companies, it is usually hard if not impossible to find out in what culture you will end up. You do the job interview, or today rather multiple instances of interviews, meet the people, show what you have done and what you can do, but usually they will not show what they can do. I wonder why, and have had some nasty surprises in the past. They might show you around the office, demonstrate the table football, show you the Wii and the lounge, but I have never seen that you get to see their source code. Wouldn’t that be even more important?

As software developer, you focus more on the code, the architecture, the tools, the inspiring and ingenious desings around you. So why not demonstrate what a cool company you could be joining by showing you the self-explanative code, the well-founded architecture, the smooth continous build system and how little build breakages are there, for you to work with? I think this tells a lot about your potential future colleagues and their skills, and obviously also whether you will be spending the next months implementing new features or cleaning up their stuff.

Which of the two companies would you choose -

1. A company with a development process in a desolate state, 1000 not-yet-fixed bugs in the bug tracker, compiler warnings switched off, a rotten architecture, non-functioning and non-standardized tool chains?
2. Or a company which has a thorough build system, CI and CM under control, lot’s of automated testing in place, an easy to grasp and well documented (or even automatically enforced…) architecture, where you can setup your dev environment within minutes instead of hours because the scripts run out-of-the-box?

Certainly for your career it might be easier to excel in number one type companies as it doesn’t take much effort to make a positive contribution. I certainly have met developers who like this position in a company, as they can stand out from the crowd quite quickly. My take on this though is that in pursuit of mastery, you need to surround yourself with people who are equal in knowledge or better than yourself – you want to learn from them, and you want to be challenged in order to grow your skills. Craftsmanship needs the right environment, and if you see it in the their source, you can be sure you will get the room for it as well.

Having joined conject only last week, from what I have seen so far I have made the right choice

I have interviewed I think hundreds of software developers for various positions – and believe me, most did not ask the right questions about their future job given the opportunity. Make sure you ask the right questions!