Matt's Homepage

In 2013, Steven Wilhite told The New York Times, “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

Steve Wilhite was best known for inventing the GIF file format in 1987 – and he even won a Webby Award. “It’s been an incredibly enduring piece of technology,” said David-Michel Davies, the executive director of The Webby Awards. “Even as bandwidth has expanded it has been very exciting to see how much cultural cachet the format has gotten.”

Mr. Wilhite, then working at CompuServe (the nation’s first major online service) knew the company wanted to display things like color weather maps. Because he had an interest in compression technologies, Mr. Wilhite thought he could help.

“I saw the format I wanted in my head and then I started programming,” he said in an e-mail. (He primarily uses e-mail to communicate now, after suffering a stroke in 2000.) The first image he created was a picture of an airplane.

The prototype took about a month and the format was released in June 1987.

“I remember when other people saw the GIF,” he said. Colleagues abandoned work on other black and white formats, he said, as graphics experts began to spread the GIF online. A triumph of speed and compression, the GIF was able to move as fast as Internet culture itself, and has today become the ultimate meme-maker.

Most people prepare for interviews by practicing their responses to the most common questions. It is obviously critical to demonstrate you are qualified for the job, but one largely overlooked fact is that job satisfaction and the reasons that people leave jobs is often related to the work environment, team dynamics, and management of the position. Right out of college, I know I was just happy to get a job. As you move through your career and as stakes go up for switching jobs (having to move, family, etc), you should also be taking the time to see if you actually want to work for and in this job.

So how do I as a candidate interview the position to see if I like it? There are a number of resources out there, but here are some really good questions you could be asking your future coworkers/employer. During most good interviews, the interviewer should give you a few minutes to ask your questions. Time is limited, so you should have your questions already. Also, you should likely have different questions for team members, management, and leads so you can cover as many bases as you can.

Some great ones to start with (with follow up questions if you want more info):

• What does a typical day on the job look like?
• What are the main duties/examples of the kinds of projects I would do for this position? Do you anticipate them to change within the next year?
• What is turnover like in this role? What’s the previous person who held this role doing now?
• What other countries do you regularly work with and how often?

For fellow team members:

• How long have you been with the company? What’s motivated you to stay? 
• What’s your favorite thing about working for this company/group?
• What’s the hardest thing about working at this company/group for you?

Company/team:

• How would you describe the company/team culture? What kind of person tends to be happiest here?
• How did the company handle the COVID-19 pandemic? What (other) recent challenges have the company/team faced, and how has it handled them?
• What does the company/team do or offer to help employees achieve a work-life balance?

Manager:

• How is performance assessed for someone in this position?
• What would a successful candidate be able to do in the first month, 6 months, year?
• Who would I be directly reporting to in this role? 

Update: 2/3/2023

I just heard another good one to ask both the employees and managers:

• If you had the power to change one thing with your job, what would it be?

If the answer is about achieving something new with the work or an aspirational goal – that’s a good sign the environment is good. If it’s about a toxic team situation or bad management – that’s a red flag.