The first thing that stands out is that during my interviews, everyone had their video on, but now during standups and sprint planning, no one (except me) has their video on; the standups are also everyone saying "yep, working on ticket 455, probably finish that today, that's all for me, no blockers" and no real interactive discussion or engagement.
Besides explicitly asking "do you all have video on for meetings?" or "is standup more than just a one line status update?", how do you evaluate (what kinds of questions do you ask) an engineering team when interviewing to get a good sense of their culture?
Treat it almost like an interview. Write up questions, think about the questions for a while, think about what a good and bad answer looks like. They're probably going to be pretty open ended, and the conversation may be somewhat circuitous, but they will be valuable.
Questions I like to ask are things like:
- Walk me through the process from ideation, spec, code, testing, deployment, maintenance. Who owns each part? How long does each part take? Which people/roles, processes, tools/tech are involved?
- If you left, what would you want to take from this team to your next? What does the team do better than others?
- What do you think the team needs to improve at? What does it do less well than other teams you've been a part of?
- How does change happen? What mechanisms do you have for change? Can you give some examples of change happening?
- How does the team feel about... Code Review (or anything else you care about)
1. Star: Hire the best people, give them super luxurious offices and perks, let them do what they like. Something like Fog Creek, where interns get a luxurious hotel when called in for interview and get flown in via helicopter.
2. Engineering-based: The whole org chart architecture is based on pushing engineering as far as possible. Something like Google and Facebook, where management decisions are made based on data, and marketing is done from a perspective of "if you build a good product, it will be easy to sell."
3. Bureaucratic: Culture emerges from the middle managers. Job descriptions are clear cut. Often things like pay and perks follow a rigid formula and there are regular rituals and routines.
4. Autocratic: Similar to bureaucratic, but designed around one person, usually the CEO. Work, do what the boss says, get paid. Not necessarily evil, something like Steve Jobs comes to mind.
5. Commitment: Build the company as a place where people don't want to leave. Avoid firing anyone, often offering retraining for existing staff. Lifestyle perks - generous maternity leave, work from home options, training. Basecamp is a model company.
Some are hybrids, which usually does worse than the others by mixing the worst of both worlds. E.g. if you adopt a star culture, you probably can't adopt rigid project management, and you can't do two months maternity leave.
The others are not bad. E.g. Autocratic does the worst on average. But that doesn't mean it's wrong. I probably work in an autocratic environment and it's the best job so far. There's upsides, like management being fully aware of the product, development, marketing, and users.
You can probably reverse engineer interviews to see which they fit. An org chart will clearly point out most of these.
Yours sounds like it's not a star or commitment culture. But it could well be an engineering culture, which is not bad either.
They offered me the job. I turned it down. The manager was surprised and asked me why. I told him about that part of the interview and that if she wasn't able to give me any attention to even acknowledge my answer to her question, then I doubt she would give me enough to guide my work or lead me. The manager gave some weak excuses and practically begged me to take the job, even contacted my current manager at the time to pressure me. I still declined. No way am I willing to jump in that dumpster fire of a team.
It's also things around the interview itself, e.g. are you being treated respectfully, or do you feel like being just one CV among many. Do they respect your time; do they talk as an equal, or as a superior person; do they get back to you if they don't go through; and more. I find that a company that treats their applicants respectfully typically have a more agreeable culture.
Of course this is just my experience. Some game show style interview companies may turn out to have a great culture, but what I find without fail is that if you're respected as an applicant, the culture can't be that bad :)
You interview, you like what you see, form a (partially subconscious) opinion about the company/culture, take the job... and then discover some warts that weren't visible.
Now you know to be skeptical any time you interview, and make it your job to _hunt_ for the hidden warts. Ask questions as if the next N years of your happiness at work depend on it! Don't feel satisfied (or take the job) until you have reason to be relatively confident about what culture/situation you're getting into.
Honestly, this is why I'm glad I switched jobs every couple years at the beginning of my career. I've seen a wide range of types of companies (non-profit, agency, corporate, start-up). I've also experienced various cultural problems they don't reveal in the interview process.
Do they act like they have a nailed down process? It actually might be fluid, and they're presenting the current iteration.
Does the interview process not seem very rigorous? You'll have peers who aren't very competent, because the bar is low.
Make the _most_ out of learning from this experience! Make persistent attempts to move the culture in the right direction. Don't be afraid to fail at that. You can still gain a lot of growth from this.
It will be hard to evaluate the culture from an interview, you'll need to join and spend few months to know better.
Interviewing is a discussion of fit for both you and the employer, so you should feel free to ask questions (and they should allow time for this in the interview process). I would try to determine how committed the interviewers are to adhering to the company's values and mission, or if those are just words for the careers page.
For example: What is your company's mission statement? Does your team have a mission statement or vision? What is your favourite company value, and why? How do your company values factor into decision making or planning? Tell me about a recent decision influenced by your company values? If good values are embedded in the company culture, I would expect some passion and examples of their influence.
My company tries to be strongly aligned to our core values, and we have value-specific interview questions to be transparent about how those values are applied. For example, for our "Be Intellectually Honest" value one of the interview discussion points might be "Can you describe a time your manager took a stance or action that you didn’t agree with, and how you responded to it.". The spirit & intention of this core value is that we have courage in our convictions but work hard to ensure biases or personal beliefs do not get in the way of finding the best solution. This is not a pass to use candor as an excuse to make kind or unproductive remarks.
I think the specific examples you've mentioned (video during meetings, agenda/format for stand-ups) are more about connection and collaborative workflow than culture. I expect companies will probably have a core value that maps to collaboration, so you could ask how that value is reflected in team activities. Daily stand-ups in scrum are normally quick updates rather than social chatter: what did you work on yesterday, what are you working on today, any blockers. Ideally there will be other team activities that encourage more social interaction (share & learn, beverage o' clock, etc).
Personally I would encourage video-on for synchronous stand-ups and sprint planning. as otherwise it is challenging to feel engaged in the discussion. However, if your team isn't doing this you should be able to have an open conversation on why that is the case. Perhaps there is some underlying issue (video is distracting or unreliable for some) that you haven't considered. Great company culture is owned and shaped by the employees, so you should feel empowered to help make your company culture better.