[gonzo41]

--companies where the company makes more revenue by having better software.

You can get vibe of a company by asking if IT is seen as a cost center. If software is a competitive advantage you know that it's green pastures for your and yours. But places where culture holds back engineering, like being slow on the uptake of GIT or CI/CD which is often talked about online, these are places to be wary of. Those latter companies are either going to have growing pains or will die out as digitization starts to take them on.

[smashface]

I think this may be a better way to phrase what I was thinking. It doesn't have to be directly related to revenue. The revenue relation just makes it easier to be counted as core to the business model. I think it's important to say business model too. IT is core to essentially every business now, but when IT is core to the how the company fundamentally positions itself in a market it really changes things.

Though in the context of this thread, I don't know a good question to ask in an interview to tease out that information when it's not already clear. If you simply ask "is IT/engineering considered to be vital to the business model or core to company success", everyone will answer yes regardless of how the IT/engineering is actually viewed.

[WorldMaker]

A version of this line of questioning that in hindsight I sort of wished I had asked interviewing at one previous employer is something along the lines of "How much do you think your executives believe that you do in software they could go back to doing entirely on paper if they had to?" I don't know the precise wording yet, and I know it's not a universally necessary question for every "all of IT is a cost center" firm. IT can be a cost center, fine. Software development can be rolled up under IT for a number of reasons, sure. But IT shouldn't be seen as an "optional" cost center, "software" as some accidental by-product of a business dealing with a lot of "paper" when the company scaled to millions in annual revenue on the back of software-based productivity. There's entire industries, such as Insurance, that have some weird delusion that if they lost all their software overnight they'd just go back to do everything on paper and imagine they'd have zero re-scaling nightmares, brownouts, burnouts, or profit loss. It's so weirdly out of touch with reality, and I think a huge part of the disconnect (including the pay gap) between the ~post-70s C-Suite and the day-to-day operations of the majority of modern corporations.

I'm not even sure had I figured out exactly what that question should be if it would have helped that younger version of myself in the place that I was at, but it's still a useful lens moving forward if I have to stay in the "dark matter" parts of software development in the parts of corporate America that don't consider themselves software development companies.