A few more lessons from work

After being at the new job for about three months now, I've been thinking about what I'd do differently, presented with the opportunity to go back.

Ask Questions: First off, to those people who are just getting out of college and going on the interview warpath, ask questions. For God's sake, ask questions.

Ask the interviewer about benefits. This isn't just a one sided arrangement here, wherein you should feel lucky that someone is giving you a place to work. You're devoting 8 hr.'s a day of work to them, and sometimes more. So, it's not like they're doing you a favor by hiring you. If you're confident in your abilities, act like it and treat the relationship as the business relationship that it is.

The biggest thing that I would do differently now, were I to go back, would be to ask more questions in the interview. My strategy in the interview was to ask personal questions of the interviewers, instead of asking a whole bunch of business related questions. I'd ask enough to show that I knew what I was talking about, and to show that I was interested in the work. After that though, no talk of money, no talk of benefits, just get to know the people.

Two things were supposed to come of this. One, I'd get to know the people I might be working with. I figured that I can do just about anything, given the time to learn, but finding a good group of people to work with would be the hard part. So, I'd spend time getting a feel for what the interviewers were like (since they'd be managing me most likely). Two, the questions would put me more at ease, because I'm more comfortable in a more personal situation.

Well, I ended up getting to know a little about the two interviewers, but there was no way that I'd be able to get any realistic impression of what they were about over our lunch. I should've asked more questions about the business. What kind of benefits? Do you use the companies' insurance plan? Turnover rate... all kinds of things that I would've better prepared me for the job.

Asking these questions would've led to the same decision in my case. This is only because I knew two people who worked there though. I was able to extract enough information from the two of them to make an informed decision... but without them, I would not have had the slightest idea of what my company was like.

The last thing I've been pondering lately is a bit of info a co-worker shared with me recently; that one of my bosses, also an interviewer, made the comment at their hiring meeting that I was the only person who wore a tie. This really caught me off guard, mainly because I was the only person that wore a tie, but also because this may have given me the edge I needed to get the job... even though I had an employee recommendation already.