HN Explorer

How to evaluate the company culture before joining?

5 points by aearm ↗ HN
I'm moving to a new job mainly because I started to feel marginalized and no fair payment in my current company. I started to lose my interest in what I'm doing. so I decided to move to a new company I want to know more how can I check if the company that I'm moving to if it has a good company culture in term of social, career, tolerance

5 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 28.0 ms ] thread
mosalarynolife
How are you feeling marginalized?
aearm
bu paying more attention to other employees opinion than mine, have small talks between other team members using their language (not English), also better payment to them
clubm8
Glassdoor is often useful. Sort by "low" and read with a grain of salt. If it's large enough, specific issues will bubble up.
kat
When I'm getting interviewed I look for a few indicators of culture. I ask what type of backgrounds people have (are they all university, or some self-taught etc), if they promote people internally, have formal mentorship programs, how they hired the last person (because they are xyz race or random stranger), if they lunch together, what their junior to senior dev ration is, how their code review process works (do they listen to other opinions) and how frequent overtime is.

Interestingly overtime question are pretty easy to read, if they don't look you in the eye when they answer, it is a red flag. If you're lucky, the interviewer will say something like "I have kids I have to pickup, I never do overtime" - then its clear you've got a good worklife balance.

Daktest
If it's a small enough company, I would definitely suggest interviewing the founders from the perspective of an investor. Your line of questioning should be focused on asking them/yourself, "why should I invest my time in your company?"

This should raise all sorts of questions like, what's the value-prop of your product/service, what's your go-to-market plan, what is your experience building and scaling companies, etc.

If you can't personally be interested in the company after speaking to the founders - I think it's likely that it won't be of much interest to you.