Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?
I'd love to know what everyone is doing to scope out a workplace before they take a job there.
Do you email people who work there?
Do you just jump in and hope for the best?
Are there apps or sites you like?
168 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadIf you end up needing their email address because you can't send a message on LinkedIn, there's a slew of ways to find someone's email. They might list it on their Twitter, Github, or blog. Companies out there will help you guess it (Clearbit, Hunter, VoilaNorbert, etc.). And if all else fails, googling your best guesses as to what their email is (including their gmail) will often yield a match in some random mailing list, press release, or what have you.
Edit: The undesirable behavior was in reference to the lying about a personal crisis. I personally believe in transparency and wouldn’t attempt to capitalize on an employer’s sympathy by lying to them.
If anyone feels like this is dishonest what do you tell your new employer about why you are truly leaving the old position. Do you tell them the owner was rude and you told him off or do you say you left because of a bad personality fit? You are not lying but perhaps a little dishonest. You can have a personal crisis and that could be the new job.
I'm sorry, it's simply bald-faced lying. If I found out any of my hires had done this, I'd fire them.
> what do you tell your new employer about why you are truly leaving the old position.
I rarely need to tell them anything, but if they ask, I say "I'm seeking new challenges". It's not a lie, and it avoids potentially bad-mouthing prior employers. But I'll be honest here -- it's only happened twice in my career that I left a job because of something bad about the job.
Would you fire that same person if you discover a year later new challenges meant hated old boss and told them off?
Just curious are the positions you manage that easy to fill that you can fire at random?
If someone I knew was fired for that reason a lawsuit would be very likely. The manager would be let go after they lost cost the company so much money. I'm not in the US so I understand the rules might be different but usually you can't fire someone because they broke your personal moral code.
Edit: mistake in duration
Going on vacation for a week and starting a new job is very difficult to time. You come back give two weeks and have to work really hard transfering knowledge just when you need to be learning everything new job related.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/11/how-to-opt-out-of-equifa... (KrebsOnSecurity: How to Opt Out of Equifax Revealing Your Salary History)
Nor can I think of a company that would agree up front to let a new hire do this. Why would you hire people who screw over their employers? They might do the same to you one day when they have decided to leave.
This is a great way to start out with two jobs and end up with zero.
Before building KV though, my research process included looking for and reading:
- the company's career and about us pages
- an active blog w/ recent posts (w/in the last 2 months)
- LinkedIn / Twitter / GitHub of founders and existing team members (I'd also look for any old blogs written by (or press written about) these folks before they joined the company)
- checking to see if the company hosts meetups or hackathons I can attend
- seeing if I know anyone who currently works there or worked there before and then reaching out
- cold emailing or Tweeting current team members
Ps. One lesson I've learned: never judge a company based on their marketing website.
I'd expect it to start large, and then filter down with more things selected. But it's not even like it's acting the other way, including only companies that match at least one thing I clicked, because it started non-zero.
If you select multiple values, the results will be ordered by number of matches and prioritize the companies who ranked those values highest.
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by it starting on a non-zero number. Perhaps you have one of the tags selected?
Question: why not include a "high compensation"/"high equity"/"top of market comp"/etc category? Talk about culture and values is nice but as far as I'm concerned the best way for companies to show they care about engineers is to put their money where their mouth is. There's surely a subset of engineers and companies that agree with me on this. It would be useful for matching.
Suggestions: if you're not doing this already, you should limit the number of categories a company or user can select. (And if you are doing this, you should make it clear on the site.) This will help get more meaningful results. Some of the current categories are meaningless - ie. "Impressive team members" ... what company would not claim this? It's only meaningful if you restrict them to, say, 5 categories. Either do this or just eliminate these categories and keep it on pure culture traits like "eats lunch together."
2. Yup! Companies are limited to choosing 8 values. They're also forced to rank them in order of importance. As you can see, not all companies select Impressive Team Members.
1. Pretty much every other job board / recruiting tool out there filters on compensation. If you're optimizing for comp, you have plenty of places to go! However, there's no place to discover companies that share your values. There's no place to learn about the team or what your day-to-day might look like before jumping through all of the other hoops (cover letters, apps, take-home tests, whiteboarding questions...). Not until Key Values that is. This is the space I'm working to fill.
Additionally, I'd argue that constraining your job search based on comp is a mistake. After some level of $$$, an additional $10k-$20k/year means a lot less than everything else. Value alignment (aka your happiness) is worth so much more.
As a not-so-extreme example: you couldn't pay me a $300k/year to work w/ people I hated.
I suppose that's just a sign of the times, and I don't necessarily have a grudge against the company for doing so. It does however mean that the site is no longer useful to this end, at least for me.
As for directly contacting a company, I tend not to. Sometimes this works out, other times not. I thought I would hate my current job and thought I was quite unqualified, but it turned out to be pretty fantastic. Just going with the flow sometimes works out that way.
Positive Reviewer - "Hypergrowth company! Lots of opportunties, great culture!!!!"
Negative reviewer - "They hired too fast, have no clue what they're doing, and have lots of free food and ping pong."
Then you see someone at a place like Lyft with four years of real world experience and one year with the company pulling 300-400k a year without breaking a sweat. And now they’re about to jump onto the IPO rocket ship. I want to clarify that I’m not jealous of these people: it’s great. I just gotta stop and ask myself sometimes what the fuck I’m doing wrong.
Then again this is crowdsourced and might be a load of shit.
The attractiveness of this depends on whether it goes up or down. It's anybody's guess which way it'll go.
Don’t know anything about you beyond your github and HN profile, but I‘ll speculate: perhaps getting hired at 200k or less by the right company is the key to earning 300k+ within a year, while getting hired at 300k is unlikely unless you come straight from a corp/position that is known to pay more.
If you're not already considered top-tier talent, I think Amazon is the easiest way into this right now. They are hiring at an incredible rate, and their engineers are generally considered good hires by Google, Facebook, etc. The lifestyle and working environment is generally considered acceptable if not exemplary.
Also, invest some time to become an expert at technical interviews. They are somewhat orthogonal to everything else that we do, but they are a near-universal shibboleth at top companies and it doesn't take that much time to get good at them. Most of the questions fall into a few broad categories that you can learn to recognize with practice.
This worked for me. YMMV. The key was relaxing the requirement that I stay in my childhood city, although luckily I only had to move a couple hours away.
Are you sure this number still applies if you're outside of US (London, Toronto, Sydney)? My understanding is that numbers in Europe are nothing like those in the US.
I make $50k-100k AUD less in Sydney compared to Bay Area, with all the same HCOL problems.
A very, very good new grad total comp figure in Sydney is say, $150k AUD. That's $106K in USD, which is less than the salary for a new grad at Google or Facebook in the Bay Area. Throw in RSUs, signing bonus, and performance bonuses, and a new grad is making $50-100k AUD more.
What do you mean by this? I could imagine a scenario where the E3 visa puts positive pressure on Australian Software Engineer salaries, causing them to rise.
Most companies want to have folks in the same timezone, preferably in the same office. There's really no substitute for being onsite with your peers.
You want to make the most of not only the various kinds technical interviews you might encounter, but also the behavioral conversations, founder/exec chats, even cover letters are a chance to set an intentional narrative. When you're in the loop with specific companies you can even prepare for specific interview loops and negotiation expectations, and thus have particularly targeted results.
Isn't Amazon known for having the worst lifestyle and working environment out of all FAANG? https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
In the absence of a strong, healthy company-wide culture, managers create their own islands of toxicity or calm productivity. I don't know a simple answer of how to ensure you end up on the right one.
You're not doing anything wrong - only a select number of employers can afford to throw that much money at their recruits. It's just a method of recruiting, nothing more; most other smaller companies / startups can't (or won't) match it so they gain a major advantage over their competitors.
I just managed to pass their interview - maybe that counts for something, but I definitely am not a top 5% engineer. I think there are a lot of advantages you get from smaller places that you won't find at a large "FANG" company as well.
> In San Francisco and nearby San Mateo and Marin Counties it said $117,400 for a family of four was "low income", while $73,300 (£54,900) was "very low income" - the highest figures anywhere in the country. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44725026)
The cost of living in these areas is high and is still growing rapidly. At the end of the day, working in a tech hub is still a middle class to upper middle class job. You can achieve similar or better results in states like Utah and Texas, with a much better work/life balance.
I'm an ex-Californian and moved to a saner state. Total comp for me is roughly ~$150K, with almost all the bells and whistles you'd expect from Silicon Valley (still waiting for 401K matching). My commute is 20 mins and soon to be 5 mins. Property values for a large home where I live are still floating in the $500K range, with only 0.5% property tax. I haven't even topped out the market here either -- I know people making $170K salary + benefits out here.
I pore over their website, and do web searches on the company and the company's top executives. If I don't personally know anyone who works for (or used to work for) them, then I hit up my professional contacts to see if I can find someone who does. I then ask those people about their day-to-day experience at the company. I make sure to ask, at a minimum, both what they consider great about working there and what they consider awful about it.
What I'm looking for is a good fit -- does the company operate in a way that works for me? Do I feel good about what the company produces and how they do business? Are the employees generally satisfied? That sort of thing.
One thing I would never do unless I were in a crisis of some sort is to just jump in and hope for the best. It's too easy for that to go horribly wrong.
Also, it's not a great look on your CV when you've only been at a non-contract job for a very short time.
Even considering global offices, there are ~5k employees here on campus.
The problem is that every single team, organization, every executive and the functions that roll up to them, are of course different.
The best advice is what others have said here: go into the interviews bright eyed and try as hard to get a sense of the people who interview.
Are they good people? Is there a good mix of people who are task oriented vs relationship oriented?
At the end of the day, looking at things like Glassdoor, LinkedIn, will only give you a very high level picture so the interviews are your best bet.
Also, if you're anything like me, I value money quite a bit over other conditions, so asking about salary up front is a must.
This is an important point. I'm not primarily money-driven, personally, so this isn't a question I typically ask. But if it's important to you, absolutely ask.
Not to say money isn't important. I do have a minimum salary that I'll accept, and I inform them of it when they ask (and they always ask). If an employer at least meets that, I'm good. Offering more money above that is nice, but isn't as big of a driver to me as whether or not I would enjoy working there.
Someone posted asking for the best way to let a friend down easy and tell them they weren't romantically interested. Top response: "Bang his roommate."
Github to see if they have open source stuff
Company blogs
I've told companies I want to remeet the team after interviews and they've scheduled lunches for me to talk with them in a more low pressure situation
Currently I have a separate ‘home’ account for personal projects and I never touch the work ID from my home.
Also, you could and probably should create a new SSH key on the company laptop or a personal access token for HTTPS access so that it can be easily revoked when you leave.
The other edge case would be an environment where every employee is super active in OSS.
However for me, one thing I really like doing is reaching out to employees who quit/left. Ask them for honest information about why they quit and what the existing problems are.
The baseline approval rating from someone who left the company is going to be lower than people working at the company. If an ex-employee is disgruntled or bitter it doesn't tell me that much, unless I hear the same complaint from a lot of people.
If someone left because another great opportunity came along, and they are really positive about their time at the company, I'd say that's a good signal.
I would do the same if I were looking at a small company with potentially astroturfed Glassdoor ratings.