I like these guidelines.
For salary, my rule is "does the offered salary meet local norms for the position and the company's situation, and does it show respect for me and for the role I will be playing?" I wouldn't be applying for the job if "norms" for the job would not meet my needs (and, as another replier points out, leave more than a little after expenses to plan for the future).
Also, I look hard at the working conditions and environment. I don't really start talking about this stuff until after an offer, but I'm watching for signs throughout the process:
* Are the hours humane? Overworking programmers is a sign of disrespect for the role.
* Is it friendly to women? An engineering team with no women is a huge red flag of bad management and culture, for teams of more than about 5 people. For smaller teams, is there a sense that hiring women is important?
* Does the company try to dominate the employee's non-working life? Regular "happy hours", catered dinner at night (RED FLAG), bar/keggerator in the office... all bad signs to me
* Is there flexibility about when and where the work gets done, or is it ass-in-a-seat-9-to-7?
* Do people stick around? Has my manager pulled in people he/she has worked with in the past (big plus)?
That's one of the biggest red flags for me, both for work-life balance and what the company is spending money on. If they have all sorts of fancy toys around the office I'm not sure I can trust that they are spending their money wisely.
Call me cynical, but I think those "perks" exist purely for marketing purposes. The greatest expense of a ping-pong table is almost certainly the space it takes up in the office, and overall I'd say it's a relatively inexpensive marketing tactic, and it's definitely a cheap line item when it comes to employee perks as well.
The biggest issue with ping pong, and similar games (bubble hockey, foosball, bags), is that if you need a break, you will need to find someone else to take it with you. Furthermore, you are basically broadcasting to the entire workplace that you aren't working at the moment, which is disruptive even if they break is well-deserved.
I worked at a place that had something like that, and I literally never saw anyone playing it.
Personally, I'd rather a team that hires based on meritocracy than gender.
A large company without females at all would be quite suspicious, to say the least.
A lack of meritocracy causing of a lack of female engineers is ignorant.
There are plenty of meritorious but under-represented populations; especially female engineers. A culture without enough women or without a plan to hire women is a red flag. Surrounding yourself with people that support [your] unsubstantiated biases increases the likelihood that the culture is unhealthy.
Do you evaluate potential workplaces based on the number of hispanics, blacks, Australians, Irish, Jews and Muslims as well?
Are you also concerned about the lack of female plumbers? Construction workers? Miners, perhaps?
For dev jobs, both the problem visibility and remedial actions are obvious to me.
To answer your question: yes
Also, these industries are male dominated because they require hard labour and working conditions, which is often biologically unsuitable for women. Even then, in South Asian countries you can find even ratio females to males in construction work. They do the same hard labour as men, and as the use of machinery and automation is rarer (in these regions), it's even more manual hard labour.
Because on the one hand I agree with the sentiment, but I also agree with the original statement that having a decent sized team without women is a red flag. Every place I've worked, even if in development there were few women (due to, yes, it being hard to find them), there were plenty as product owners, as QA, or as UX. Whereas the one place I can think of that I worked that only had one at the time I joined (the marketing person, for a small startup of 20 people), it was quite toxic and unwelcoming when they later added a female UX.
7. What excites the people working there? (the people you interviewed with). Is it passion for company mission? Great colleagues? Big investors / lots of money raised (red flag)? Frat culture? (specific schools or groups) (red flag).
On 2,3 and 4. Some companies have anonymous interview procedures where your manager or team mates might not be the people interviewing you (more so if you are straight out of college).
My addition for new grads: I would incline towards companies with tough interviews(comparatively), probability of smarter colleagues and high expectations. I might be totally wrong, after all I have been in the industry for only two years.
I go further on #2 and ask myself, "Do I want to work for this person?" (in terms of character, trust, will he/she have my back, do they care about my growth, etc.) and "Will I learn a lot from this person?" (skills, experience, industry knowledge, etc.)
1. Is the salary enough to pay my rent, feed me, and allow me to save a little bit every month? (This one is obvious. Don't take a job that will put you in debt!!!)
2. Do I trust that my direct manager will protect me from bullshit? (This is a REALLY important one for me, and is the reason I've rejected offers. If your future manager is an asshole or treats you like shit during the interview, don't take the job. A good manager exists to make sure you do the best work you can possibly do for the company, and gives you any resources you might need for that. A good manager is your leader, not your enemy.)
3. Will I be able to learn and grow in this role? (A good manager will help immensely with this one.)
4. Do I like the people I will be working with? (If you don't at least tolerate the people you work with on a daily basis, you're going to be miserable).
5. Is my commute within reason?