What do you ask every new employer?
Most programmers know about the Joel test - 12 yes/no questions to quickly evaluate where a company stands in its development department. These questions are things like "do you use source control" and "do you have a spec".
What are the equivalent questions for sysadmins? What are the 10 or 12 yes/no questions that indicate the cluefulness of the employer?
Solution 1:
- Do you have a dedicated server room/colo?
- Do you do backups?
- Do you have a repeatable machine build?
- Do you have a trouble ticket tracking system?
- Do you have a firewall? How is its configuration tracked or backed up?
- Am I expected to run cabling, or do you have a contractor/facilites mgr for that?
- Who runs the phone system?
- Where do you keep documentation on procedures?
Solution 2:
- What is your pager/on call procedure? What does the current rotation look like?
- What operating systems do you support for the desktop?
- What is your work from home policy?
- Do your system administrators also do network administration tasks?
Solution 3:
What hours do you try to work, what hours do you normally work, what hours do you occasionally work. You can learn a lot from these answers.