Andrew Duffy is working on creating a software company in Dublin that respects its employees. I agree with almost everything in his article describing his ideal company, and today he posted another interesting article about respectful interviewing.
It doesn’t seem like Andrew should even have to write about this stuff, but it’s true. I’ve personally been in job interviews that felt more like interrogations, and I’ve heard anecdotes of even worse treatment. I try to give interviewers some slack; a lot of times the interviewers have never had any formal training or education on conducting interviews. I’ve been on the hiring side of the interviewing table enough to understand how difficult it is. But some interviewers are downright adversarial!
In any case, it’s nice to see another software developer trying to build a great place to work. My feeling is that unless the founder focuses on this as an explicit goal, the default tendency is for companies to get lazy and lapse into mediocrity (this is true about almost anything that isn’t given conscious attention). Even the companies that say they want to provide a good working environment generally get caught up in day-to-day chaos, or flinch at the expense (trivial, in the long term) of creating such a workplace, and everything slips into the doldrums. So I’m glad to hear that Andrew is giving a lot of thought to this!