Flutterby™! : Letter to a potential employer

Excerpted from a letter I wrote this morning to someone whom I'm exploring employment options with, and thought I should drop in here. After the preliminaries, it began:

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I too have a few suitability/fitting in questions. My Dad's in town helping me build this workshop. I described what I thought this job involved and he said "sounds kinda mundane for what your work history is". I think there are fascinating challenges in supporting business processes, but how I fit in to those challenges is going to be important.

My questions are roughly:

• Markups being what they are, a senior developer/whatever like me should be bringing roughly a quarter to a half a million dollars of value per year to a company, whether through direct revenue (ie: add a markup and sell my services to someone else) or indirect revenue (do this to support ongoing business processes, like assembly line work), or creation of assets (preferred: build processes/systems that continue to create revenue).

And obviously that value is also weighted by risk and so forth.

In some companies with some people that's "we have faith, look at our problems and find a way to do that" (this was what happened when I joined Pixar, which was great in the Interactive Group, less great in the Graphics R&D group), in some places that's "here's a list of tasks, execute them" (Did that at Gracenote), most places are somewhere in between. So the questions I'd ask of anyone up the management chain from me that I'm interviewing with are things like: How do you see that happening? How do you measure success in that task? What paths forward do you see for that role?

• You mentioned 9 or 10 projects for every one you can do. To the limits of business-proprietary, I would *love* to take one of those and drill down on what that means: Who are the customers (in your case, other groups internal to [Elided])? Where does the data come from? What's the plumbing necessary to move things around? What development processes do you have in place? How do you measure the value of that project to the company, both in prioritizing things to do, and in evaluating whether or not they were successful.

I'm happy to have whatever conversations you'd like to on assessing my technical viability for the role you see for me, on my side I'd like to create a better view of what that that role could be and what the future paths from that role are.

I'm not an org chart climber, there are skills I know I have and skills I know I don't have, but I do want to be sure that I am going to be challenged, that I'll be in a position where I can be successful, and where I can gauge that success, and where I have a reasonably good chance of waking up every morning and saying "this excites me and I can't wait to tackle the next problem".