Ask to see a current project-plan for an active development project. They should be able to walk right into the other room and just print one out from Microsoft Project or its equivalent. If not, ask: “Why not?”

Uh .. I don't necessarily agree with the whole "Everything's got to be in MS Project" concept. As long as management and developers are talking and there's agreement that things are moving in the right direction and targets are being met, things are fine.

Look the interviewer squarely in the eye and ask him or her how many times a year anyone has been required to work overtime. If the answer is a number greater than one, ask: “Why? What went wrong?”

Yeah .. that may end the interview on a bit of a downer. If you've been on the operations side of software support, you know that unexpected things happen and overtime is required. It's probably better to ask an open question like "How do you deal with overtime?" or "How busy are you right now?" than it is to ask a closed question such as the one you suggest.

Overtime gets compensated -- my deal at $work[-2] was that I got double time off for a support call, so that a one hour call gave me two hours off, and if the call interrupted my sleep, I would just sleep in, have breakfast and get to work whenever I got to work; my employer was fine with that. If you're talking about development overtime, then I expect that, after the rush, the company would tell the developers to take a few days or a week off and go home and sleep.

But these days I can't believe that managers think they're going to get 50% more quality code done by getting their developers to work 50% longer hours. I think research has shown that after eight hours developers start to make mistakes, then have to spend time to fix those mistakes -- so you're not really any further ahead, and you may even be further behind if some of those mistakes were bad design decisions.

If you find yourself in such a hole, look for ways to inject organization and planning into the process any way that you can. Start by organizing yourself. Keep a diary and a time-log. Turn off the e-mail and check it only at 9, 12:30, and 4. Get a calendar scribble-pad for your desk and actually scribble. With practice it will begin to become habit, and sometimes habits spread (in a good way) to other people around you.

I started keeping a log book a few years back -- it was something my colleague Mike Stok did, and it's fantastic. Now when someone asks me something, I flip back in the book and read out the command I typed. That's way better than "Oh, I think I typed in ..". I can also pin-point, to day anyway, when I actually did something a few weeks or months back.

Some days I cover half a dozen pages with notes -- and those notes are extremely valuable. Without those notes I'd have to go ask some people questions that I asked them a month ago -- that's not professional, that's just plain dis-organized.

But if they don't... feed the monster, roll the dice. And next time around, ask those “awkward” questions!

I've also heard that personal connections, or networking, actually produce 60-70% of jobs, and the web sites that you mentioned work about 1% of the time. I put more faith into a site like LinkedIn myself. I found my last two jobs through personal connections -- it works for me.