Joining a new job ? Make sure to ask these

Consider a scenario where an interviewer asks you if you have any questions about the company or the role for which you’re interviewing. Do you have a number of questions to ask, or are you left wondering? If you’re not sure about what questions to ask, you’ll have a fair indication of which way to go once you’re done watching this video.

Why do you need to ask questions during an interview, you wonder? Well, doing so can give you a clear picture of what to expect in your new job, and it can also help you make a well-informed decision.

While questions might vary depending on the type of role you’re applying for, here are some that remain common no matter which technology-based role you seek.

Will I have ownership of products?

It helps to find out if you’ll have to work along a predetermined path or if you’ll have enough influence to affect changes. For instance, you might get complete ownership of a product as soon as you join one organization, whereas you might have to wait indefinitely in another. Find out who decides product roadmaps and who is responsible for providing inputs. Ask if you’ll get to interact will all important stakeholders. This will better indicate your role in the organization.

Can I work on side projects?

Bear in mind that not all companies encourage or even allow their employees to take on side projects. Ask if working on side projects is allowed, be it contributing to open source platforms or developing software. If it’s allowed, your next question should cover the process you need to follow. Then, find out if you will need to get permission from the legal department. In some cases, companies take ownership of their employees’ side projects, especially if they’re related to the same market segment.

What will my work hours look like?

Sure, you get an indication of your work hours before you join. However, make sure you ask how realistic the timings are, ideally from an existing team member. This is because hiring and process managers might not give you the real picture.

How good is the company with following customer timelines?

Try to determine the approach your probable employer follows when adhering to timelines set by its customers. For instance, if a customer requires a product in two months, will the company ensure that it delivers within the given time frame? While an answer in the affirmative might speak well about the company’s outlook toward its customers, it can also indicate signs of burnouts for its employees – because you might need to burn the midnight oil, over and over again.

Who are your biggest clients and what pain points do you address?

Answers to these questions will vary significantly. However, what you need to look for in the answers is if they’re aligned. If you feel they’re largely misaligned, you get two options from which to choose. You may either view this as a red flag or consider taking it on as a challenge.

How many employees work from home?

Given the change in working styles and environments that have come about because of the COVID-19 pandemic, this question begs to be asked. While some companies are going all out in getting their employees to work from home, some others are not as forthcoming. 

Questions You Need to Ask Before Joining a Startup

If you plan to join a startup, you might benefit by asking these questions as well.

• What problem is the company trying to solve, and what is its USP?
• What’s your long-term vision for my role, my team, and the organization?
• What is your growth strategy?
• Is the company looking at being acquired soon or does it plan to move ahead on its own?
• Do you have an exit strategy in place?
• Who are the existing shareholders?
• How many months of operations can you sustain before the next round of funding?
• What is the biggest risk that the company faces?

Remember that an interview gives you the opportunity to clear any doubt you might have about your new job. Asking the right questions at this stage is crucial if you wish to sail smoothly down the line. After all, what good is landing up in a role or an organization that does little for your career’s growth?

Do I complain? How to handle a trash talking coworker?

Have you ever been in a meeting where you or your coworkers were getting trash talked by a toxic coworker and not even given the chance to discuss or resolve the issue in an open and fair discussion?! There is a high chance that you have gone through this situation yourself at least once and even if you didn’t, you might encounter such a situation in the future. This article will guide you on how to handle such a situation by standing for yourself or your coworker and refusing to get stepped on by the toxic trash talking coworker. Whether you are on the right side or on the wrong side, you have to step up for the trash talking as this is not the correct way to fix an issue. The manager or team leader has to step in and play his role in resolving the conflict in case of situation escalation. Disagreements and conflicts are inevitable. People are different and each person has his/her unique set of qualities, both good and bad. Problems occur! Such problems if not resolved early can negatively affect the work space and create an atmosphere of toxicity. 

Trash Talking problem

Trash talking is the act of making insulting remarks in attempt to demoralize and humiliate another person, whether a coworker or an opponent. The way a trash talker is handled is very critical and decisive. The first step is to clearly identify the problem or the cause that created the motive to trash talk. There has to always be a problem or issue behind the trash talking. The trash talker won’t simply come up to you and start trash talking for no reason. So, the ability to identify a probable cause is crucial, whether you think you are right or not. If identified early, the issue can be resolved easily before it escalates and gets worse. It is always advisable to look out for signs of accusations before they escalate and watch out for soft disagreements that are ought to be addressed right on the spot before they rest in and grow. 

Ways to handle trash talking coworkers

Now, if you failed to identify the problem and the conflict started to escalate and the trash talking commenced, then here are some tips on how to handle the situation. There are three main possible players for such a situation. You can be the coworker himself/herself, who is getting trash talked or you can be a coworker, who is just spectating the whole situation or you can be the manager or team leader of the conflicting coworkers. Let’s start with the first case, where you are the coworker who is getting trash talked by another coworker. Firstly, you need to try and understand the problem and the view point of the trash talker. You will need to state facts with evidence to help support you position such as emails and messages. Instead of merely arguing, just show proof that supports your point and defends your position. For example, if are accused of not completing your task on time, just mention something like: “As per our conversation on the 5th of February, you didn’t provide any feedback, so I hadn’t had the chance to wrap things up. I followed again on the 15th and there was no response from your side as well, as a result I wasn’t able to wrap things up on time.” It is essential that you understand the position of the accuser in team. If he has a better hold on the manager than you, and you get constantly cornered all the time even after the manager’s intervention, then it is highly possible that your manager is not doing enough and it is better to plan an exit from the team, as there is nothing much you can do. An escalation to the manager’s boss will help the company, but may not benefit you. Now, let’s move on to the second case, where you are a spectator. In this case, you need to make sure that you listen to both sides of the story and be sure that you understand the issue correctly. You are then required to intervene and come to a conclusion on who is right and who is wrong, if any. This will help resolve the issue using a third unbiased party and will make the conflicting parties keener on listening to your decision and solution. You should also inform the trash talker that trash talking is a bad way of conveying your frustration at a work place and that there are many other possible ways by which you can reach the coworker and let him know of your concerns and problems in a more friendly manner. Our final scenario is being the manager and coming in play to resolve the conflict. As a manager, handling team conflicts is your responsibility. You need to make sure that you listen to both sides of the story and be sure that you get the full picture. Then you are required to intervene and decide who is wrong and who is not in a professional and unbiased way that doesn’t undermine or hurt anyone’s feelings. To avoid situation escalation, it is recommended that you meet with the team members frequently and make sure that they are not facing any issues or problems. In case of the existence of issues and within team conflicts, it is recommended that you talk to each individual alone and tell him/her what ought to be done.

Conclusion

To conclude, trash talking back to a toxic coworker is not going to solve anything but rather escalate the situation, hinder work flow and have its detrimental impacts destroy the team or the company. Handling such situation should rather be with reason, proof, logic and according to work place laws and rules. In case the accusing trash talker is offensive and doesn’t take logic and proof for an answer and the same situation is repeated regularly, then you are faced with two main choices. You can either escalate the situation to the manager or team leader or you can request to leave the team or work place, if the manager didn’t help or was unfair to you. 

What is an SRE?

Introduction

With the incorporation of software in almost every industry and the huge dependency on programming and computer science, it was just a matter of time before a new discipline was introduced. According to Ben Treynor Sloss, who is Google’s engineering vice president, “A site reliability engineer is a software engineer who is responsible for developing an operations function”. Site reliability engineering (SRE) uses the versatility of software to handle regular IT operations such as server management and other computer operations by establishing reliable software systems. SRE task forces usually utilize and develop software to handle project issues and problems, increase project autonomy and manage the entire project’s process with minimum manual intervention and manpower. Despite being a commonly used term in classifying work teams, the majority of the people working in both software and project management industries are still not fully aware of the underlying concept behind site reliability engineering. This article is an attempt to clarify what does an SRE do, how is an SRE important to business and projects, how are SRE teams different from DevOps and what kind of tools and technologies that an SRE utilize.

What does a site reliability engineer do?

SRE work can be divided into two main tasks. About half the time is spent on developing and programming new features, increasing system autonomy and project scaling. The rest of the time is spent on operations related work including tasks that require personal intervention and on-call duties. So an SRE should have a balanced mix of system administration skills and software programming, automation and engineering. Among the duties of an SRE is the code deployment, configuration and monitoring in addition to responding to emergencies and managing production service capacities.

How important are site reliability engineers?

SRE makes the project management process of large projects easier by developing complicated codes and algorithms that handle most of the regular and daily tasks. The software developed can be expanded to administer a huge spectrum of machinery and equipment within a company. As I mentioned earlier, SRE’s work can be divided into two main sections, standardization and automation. It is the goal of an SRE to improve a system’s reliability and features while automating operations tasks. The unique role of an SRE requires programming skills and operations management experience. SRE teams are particularly important for startups. Due to its small scale and inability to hire large groups of developers at large scale, having SRE teams would be extremely beneficial for the startup. After understanding how important are SRE teams to a company and what kind of work do they handle, we now need to discuss how do SRE teams work within a development team. 

How different are DevOps from site reliability engineers?

Site reliability engineering implements the idea of DevOps at its core. But what are DevOps? DevOps simply denotes development and operations, where developers are responsible for writing codes, which are then passed on to the operations team for installation and support. However, due to the separation between both teams, developers were not responsible for how the software or features would be used, leaving the operations team in a bad position. This led to problems because the goal of the developers is to keep introducing new features for the customers with new pieces of code, whereas the operations teams are seeking a steady system with stable and steady changes. However, by combining both teams and helping them understand each other’s duties and responsibilities, introducing new features will not only be based on developing the code for the feature itself but also on the consequences and fallout this new introduction might lead to. DevOps and site reliability engineering are often confused because of their similarity in many aspects and properties. Both DevOps and SRE seek high quality and fast services delivery as well as life cycle development, by optimizing business value and responsiveness through automation, platform operation enhancement and integrating both development and operations teams. Now, let us see how is SRE different from DevOps. First of all, SRE teams take to their own hands the duty to eliminate communication and workflow issues. SRE teams’ main goal is to achieve site reliability while adding novel ideas and features, whereas DevOps are mainly concerned with efficient development of operation using platforms such as Kubernetes and microservices. Unlike DevOps, SRE teams split their working time between operations and development tasks such as systems scaling and automation implementation, which is a crucial aspect in the site reliability engineer’s role. A key component for SRE teams is to achieve that balance between both operations and development work. 

What kind of technology supports a site reliability engineer?

In order to determine the type and time of features to be launched, SRE teams use Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which are used to determine the necessary system reliability depending on Service Level Indicators (SLIs) such as availabilities, rate of error, requested latency and systems throughput, and Service Level Objectives (SLOs), which are based on specified goal values and budget error. Due to the fact that an integral aspect of SRE’s work is automation, unified software containers usually provide teams with a common development environment facilitating work integration, automation and delivery.

Conclusion

Incorporating site reliability engineers can be handful especially for startups. They can assist developers by solving some of their general issues, hence providing them with more time to handle programming specific issues. They can also improve the capabilities of the tools used by developers to help them become more productive. In addition, the customer will be provided with a product that has high reliability and security. It is important to mention that finding an SRE to join the team is not quite simple due to the fact that they are looking for a person who are able to multitask and handle both operations and software engineering at a high level. It is always a pleasure to answer all your questions and see you in the next one.

**Note: All the attached photos are royalty free and not copyrighted. 

Best City for HW Career

Introduction

To begin with, we need to be clear about what we mean by hardware careers and what are the most common hardware career paths then we will be able to decide which cities are best for hardware careers based on several factors. Among the most common hardware career jobs are hardware design, verification and backend positions. 

Hardware design involves arranging essential hardware components into a well-defined and collaborated assembly of hardware to create and support a system’s current features and processes and any kind of expected future requirements or adjustments. Accordingly, hardware design can be considered an algorithm or a partitioning scheme that takes into consideration most of the required system’s needs by creating an assembly of subsystems that integrate to create a well built and developed system. Unlike software design, hardware design is more limited by real physical boundaries. Hardware verification involves checking for correct feature and system implementation and it hugely affects the quality, price and timing in silicon development. The hardware designing process is followed by development, testing, adjusting, collaborating and product finalization. 

Hardware careers are often associated with software markets and industries, as there is a lot of collaboration between both parties to deliver the final product to be used by the customer. These careers are not only limited to computer devices or industries but it also includes automobile components and medical appliances with embedded systems. People pursuing careers in hardware usually work in labs where they spend most of their time designing, building and testing hardware. They are also required to communicate with other teams of different backgrounds and tasks to come up with a final design that would fit and work with the system as a whole. Hardware careers are mainly based on research and development to create more powerful components that are smaller in size, more power efficient and packed with potential to handle various system features. 

In the following paragraphs, I will present some cities that are known for being in the lead for Hardware Manufacturing and consequently hardware careers. Mainly I will be focusing on cities in the United States and at the end I will add some cities outside the United States that are worth mentioning. Now let’s go ahead and start with cities inside the United States.

The Bay Area, California

Historically, the Bay Area in California is known for being the hub for hardware manufacturing in the west coast particularly in the field of tech manufacturing. Many cities there observed the beginning of market giants such as Mountain View, Menlo Park, Cupertino and much more. Also, the headquarters of these giants are in the bay area in California. For example, Google Headquarters is in Mountain View, Apple Headquarters is in Cupertino in Santa Clara, Intel Headquarters is in Santa Clara ... etc. All these tech companies have a large hardware manufacturing division, and for that reason, it is a good place to tackle the Hardware career there. Not only that, but there is also a good number of ventures backed startups in Hardware manufacturing. It is also home to the renowned Silicon Valley, where all inventions and hardware breakthroughs come to life. In addition, in the renowned Bay Area we can find Palo Alto, Santa Clara, San Jose, Sunnyvale, San Francisco, Fremont and Milpitas. But let’s focus on Silicon Valley, that renowned region that is in the southern part of San Francisco bay area and int the northern part of California. We can’t be talking about hardware without mentioning Silicon Valley. It is considered the main international and national center for cutting edge inventions. Three main factors contributed to the success of Silicon Valley as a hardware and technology international hub. These factors are mainly the available capital ventures in the area and the research buildings housed in university areas, in addition to the constant U.S. Department of Defense investments. In 1957, the “traitorous eight” deserted William Shockley to invent the Fairchild Semiconductor, which diverted the attention of Hewlett Packard aka HP to semiconductor devices. Since then, HP was considered one of the main symbolic founders of the renowned Silicon Valley. It is not only HP that has hardware offices and divisions in Silicon Valley, other huge companies such as Microsoft (Sunnyvale office), Google (Mountain View office) and Apple (Cupertino and San Diego) are all involved in Silicon Valley as hardware manufacturers and inventors. Here is a list of some of the hardware companies that are located in Silicon Valley and that you might be familiar with:

• Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in Sunnyvale
• Altera (Intel) in San Jose
• Apple Inc. in Cupertino
• Asus in Fremont
• Cisco Systems in San Jose
• Fitbit in San Francisco
• Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto
• Logitech in Newark
• Nvidia in Santa Clara

Detroit, Michigan 

“Motor City” is what people call Detroit in Michigan for the long history in car manufacturing. Detroit is the origin of many car manufacturing companies in the United States in the last century. Ford, Cadillac, General Motors, Chevrolet, Dodge and Chrysler are all examples for car manufacturing companies that were founded in Detroit as early as the mid nineteenth century. Nowadays, the car manufacturing industry does not only include mechanical components, but new technologies and inventions are integrated in the industry such as self-driving cars and cars2x communications that connect all the vehicles together with the roads and transportation infrastructure.

Seattle, Washington State

Despite the relatively smaller existence and impact of both Microsoft and Amazon in Seattle, the city has a rich history of hardware with a huge aerospace company and manufacturer, Boeing. Among those hardware corporations with offices in Seattle are:

• Nintendo in Redmond
• Linksys and Cisco
• Oculus
• Intel in the international district
• Blue origin

Austin, Texas

Austin, Texas is an industrial hub for the manufacturing industries. Numerous tech companies have offices in there; for example, Dell has its headquarters in a suburb of Austin. If you lived in Texas, you might have heard of the term Silicon Hills. Silicon Hills is the name of a group of high-tech companies that are in Austin. Among the cutting-edge industries located in Silicon Hills are:

• Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
• Apple Inc.
• Amazon.com
• IBM
• Google
• Silicon Labs
• Intel
• Dell (international headquarters are located in Round Rock, which is a suburb of Austin)

Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon is another well-known city for hardware manufacturing. It is known for the manufacturing of displays, printers, computer chips and many other electronic gadgets. Silicon Forest is the name of a group of companies that are involved in cutting edge technologies and hardware that are located in Portland. As you might have guessed it, the name is analogous to Silicon Valley and Silicon Hills. Hardware companies located in Portland work within a wide range of hardware industries. For example, Tektronix is specialized in test and measurement hardware, Intel is specialized in computer chips, Infocus and Pixelworks are specialized in electronic displays manufacturing and development, Hewlett Packard and Epson are specialized in printers manufacturing and development. Following is a list of some of the major hardware companies located in Portland:

• Apple Inc.
• EPSON
• Google
• Hewlett Packard
• Logitech
• Nvidia corporation
• Synopsys

Other cities worth mentioning outside the United States:

Hamburg

In the European region, Hamburg is considered one of the best places for hardware and computer careers. It is Germany’s 2nd largest city and the 6th city in Europe. It currently hosts lots of innovative tech scenes and sponsors a wide range of startups. 

Eindhoven

The Dutch city of Eindhoven is another city that produces about 23 patents per 100,000 residents. It is well-known for its industrial capabilities. In 2013 and according to Forbes, Eindhoven is considered the most innovative and inventive city in the whole world. In addition, the city is considered the best among European countries and even the world for leading high tech hardware careers. This is mainly due to a couple of reasons such as the capability of the high-level research facilities to produce and test hardware prototypes as well as the inventive and innovative behavior of the public residing in the city. 

Munich

Germany is coming strong in this list with another city. Munich is considered a main hub for business in Europe. It is home to huge international companies and businesses such as Allianz, Siemens and BMW. This makes it one of the favorable cities in the world to pursue hardware careers whether in computer or other industries. Munich is not only home to multinational companies but also small startups across different industries such as virtual reality, media, mobility, computer, finance and loT. 

Conclusion

After presenting some of the best cities inside and outside the United States known for leading hardware careers, it is all up to you to decide. Obviously, Germany is one of the best countries outside the US that offer a high variety of opportunities in HW career, however, the language factor is very important. It is a must to be fluent in the German language to be able to land any technical job specifically in the hardware career. I am sure there are a lot of questions in your mind now. I will be glad to answer all your questions and see you in the next one.

References:

1. Sokanu. “What Does a Computer Hardware Engineer Do?” CareerExplorer, CareerExplorer, 1 May 2020, www.careerexplorer.com/careers/computer-hardware-engineer
2.  “The 10 Best States For Lead Hardware Engineers In 2020.” BEST STATES FOR A LEAD HARDWARE ENGINEER, Zippia, 18 May 2020, www.zippia.com/lead-hardware-engineer-jobs/best-states/
3. Joyner, Jeffrey. “The Best Places for Computer Engineering Careers.” Work, 21 Nov. 2017, work.chron.com/places-computer-sengineering-careers-19874.html
4. Lee, Edward A. Hardware Design, ScienceDirect Topics, 2002, www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/hardware-design
5. “Hardware Verification.” T&VS, 12 Oct. 2017, www.testandverification.com/solutions/hardware-verification
6. “Best European Cities for Tech Jobs.” Best European Cities for Tech Jobs: Our Top 9 Picks of 2020, 2018, blog.honeypot.io/9-european-cities-for-tech-jobs-2018/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_based_in_the_San_Francisco_Bay_Area#Electronics
9. https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/773fec/what_is_happening_with_hardware_in_seattle_lately/
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Hills#cite_note-3
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Forest
12. Silicon Valley - Wikipedia

 **Note: All the attached photos are royalty free and not copyrighted.