[icey]

One of the best metrics I've found for determining the overall satisfaction level of a department is turnover rate.

If you ask the interviewer about their turnover rate and they hedge, be cautious. Sometimes they won't know what the turnover rate is because they're too new, or don't pay attention to it, so you can ask about the average number of years that the developers have been there (which they should know).

There are so many factors that figure in to developer happiness that it's hard to build a good checklist of things to ask about. But if you look at the evidence (how long do developers stay here?), it's very easy to tell if it's going to be a good place to work.

Of course, this doesn't work when you're talking about getting a job at a startup, but the hope there would be that you already know it's somewhere you want to work; that it's not a job that someone referred you to just because you need a job.

[BadassFractal]

I personally do not feel that question will help you too much. You will be stuck within a team, say 5-10 people reporting to someone, and that is the environment you truly care about, and it's something the recruiter will not know much about. Those are the people you'll be sharing most of your time with for years and it's truly the one area you have to get right. The satisfaction level within the department is strongly secondary to that.

[rpwilcox]

Right, but if there's high turnover there's got to be an underlaying cause. (Which maybe the business itself doesn't know).

Maybe they don't pay enough, or have too many deathmarch projects, or office politics gets in the way too often, or maybe a few rounds of layoffs

Regardless, if a lot of people have left before you, there might be a reason for that, or at least it will have a factor in your environment there. (Example: A recent round of layoffs might mean a 3 person department is asked to do the work once handled by a department of 10)

[BadassFractal]

All fair points!

What is the incentive of the recruiter to tell you the truth? What if he says: "Everthing's great!!!", you can't really hold him accountable after you signed up for the job. They're salesmen. Is the idea to look for subtle indications of not everything being great?

[cpeterso]

Recruiters are salesmen, But the OP suggested asking the interviewer. Developer interviews often have multiple rounds with different interviewers, so you get a chance to ask the same question to multiple people. If their answers don't match, beware! :)

[saturn]

Not so sure about this. Good programmers can change jobs very frequently. I know many people who have never stayed at the same company more than a couple of years. That's just part of their ambitious, challenge-seeking nature, the will to improve and take things to the next level - it's not really an indictment of the places they stayed before.

I'd be suspicious of a departmnt with a turnover rate around 6 months, sure, but if it was 5 years I'd be equally worried, because unless working for that company was the shit then I'd be concerned with the kind of developers the company had hired in the past and what kind of culture such a bunch of unambitious seat-warmers had developed, and I'd be expected to fit into.

[icey]

The sweet spot that I've noticed seems to be around 3 years average. Anything more than that doesn't appear to make a difference in overall happiness levels. Lower than that and I start to have concerns.

This was a question I used to ask my consulting clients to get a feel for what sort of department I was going to be walking in to. The higher turnover places always had the worst development practices in place (or none at all, like a complete free-for-all), and the places with less developer turnover tended to have fewer people focused on guaranteeing themselves job security & more people focused on efficiency.

[saturn]

Yep, matches up with my experience pretty well. Around 2 or 3 years is a good sign that the place isn't a terrible place to work, and also that it's not full of make-work existence-justifying lifers.

A bad place to work can actually be fun for a while, if you have good coworkers. It can be a bonding experience, a rite of passage, friendships forged in the fires of mt doom etc. But indifferent management and ashen-faced zombie coworkers determined to cling to their mediocre jobs until they rot to death in their seats? It's a different type of poison, but just as deadly ..