Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
I've moved around quite a bit these past several years and I feel like every company has been the same. Management don't know what they want the product to be. Project managers don't know anything about technology. There's an offshore team in Traansylvania busy making it a legacy codebase. They don't want to give developers raises...
I see "Who's Hiring?" threads and "Who Wants To Be Hired?" threads. How about a "Who Doesn't Suck To Work For?" thread?
Not sure if this will take off or get deleted ...but if it does take off, it would be great if developers --not recruiters-- replied to this. Tell us why your company is a good place to work so we can apply there :-)
446 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 422 ms ] threadI think a better place to focus than looking for non-shitty companies would be focusing on finding coworkers who are good at navigating the shit in a way you respect. When the going gets rough, who are the people you want to be around? What are the behaviors you want them to show you? How can you determine that in an interview?
Based on your description, it sounds like you're looking for a smaller company where the CEO is technical, and understands what the developers are doing.
This is probably an under talked-about part of the interview process: that you should be interviewing the company as much as the company is interviewing you.
No easy answers here I think...
Slightly more serious, it's often more about your team than the company overall. If your manager is terrible, life is hell. If your manager's manager is terrible, it's going to be pretty uncomfortable. If the executives are terrible, you might do okay, but keep your resume up to date and shop around just in case they wreck it.
That said, it would be nice to see more authenticity than what mostly gets posted in the hiring thread, and on company websites. I'm sure we each have our own criteria of what kind of info we'd like to see, but I rarely see anything more than the usual bromides.
Honestly, I've found glassdoor to be pretty good if you've had a few jobs before. It's pretty easy to find which reviews to discard, and read between the lines for red flags even in places that are relatively highly rated.
I would say... if there is a company with 6,000 employees... it's going to depend way less on the company and more on the team. Your direct manager, your teammates, the other teams you work with, the other managers involved... that can all wildly vary even within the same company.
They are fluid too. People come and go. Circumstances change.
I don't know how much top-down leadership effect really has. If the CEO + board of a 20,000 person company feel a certain ideology, is it really passed down 10 layers lower to managers working on small projects?
There is still large variation per org/team, but there are definitely a lot of things that can permeate all the way down. The way hiring is done, the way performance is evaluated and promotions/raises are done, the way weekly org-wide metrics meetings are done, the way escalations are handled, even the way we hold meetings or write documents... At Amazon, all of these things are influenced (or directly guided) by processes that are put in place by the highest levels, and they really do have enormous impact on the overall culture of the company.
Well it's a tradeoff:
[growing pains] = [potentially valuable stock options]
[ever changing technical choices] = [not boring / not stagnating]
Similarly I have also left due to suckiness despite some people seeming to enjoy themselves. Though of course that may just be an act.
But I think they're near-impossible to pick out, unless you know folks who work there.
What I mean is: even if they publicly advertise open job roles in all the usual places, it's very tricky to actually know they're "that" kind of shop, unless you know somebody on the inside. Even if you are a very proactive candidate during your interviews.
Just IMO/IME.
Have you reached out to your network ? Those that worked at those same places with you
- Great benefits
- Very transparent leadership
- Nonprofit (501c3) - long-term sustainability of the org & product are major goals which (IMO) makes for much better project/team/personal incentives
- Remote work for any position, but also offices in Ann Arbor, NYC, and Princeton
- Education-oriented mission
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
But everything else about the company is super nice.
Google used to be a non-sucky place to work, but from what I hear from friends still there, it's not at all like it was in 2012
Large companies are more reliably mediocre across the board, but bad small companies can be outright abusive (usually you can detect these with a few questions in an interview... for example, ask how often employees work outside of regular hours).
Actually, I'd say you're lucky if you find a small company that isn't at least mildly dysfunctional.
In large companies I've had a hard time just getting everyone into the same organization on Slack, let alone changing any policy or embedded behavior.
“My job would be great except for the clients and employees*” - Me.
(my employees are awesome people - this is more about dealing with HR Issues that inevitably crop up.)
The best thing about the company are the people who are already here. The basic hiring criteria are "clever, competent and kind". That doesn't mean we never have disagreements, but they tend to be technical disagreements about the best approach to reach the same goal. Before the pandemic, and hopefully after it, the kitchen was the center of the company: casual questions turned into great discussions, explanations... there's a big whiteboard wall in the kitchen, and it got used a lot.
That goal, incidentally, is to drive down the cost of good portfolio analysis until it's within everyone's reach. We're succeeding: there are clients who have programs where people start their investments with $50/week.
Our folks are reasonably diverse in terms of background and talents. There's a robust co-op program. The benefits are pretty good -- fully paid health care premiums -- but it's definitely the people that make it great.
I think I'd qualify for the Sr. one, in terms of C/C++, the math, and the Linux experience, but I'd never held a "financial" job before. Having to move back to Boston wouldn't be ideal but I lived in Cambridge for 7 years and could do it again.
I also really dig lots of the topics I see on the company blog, and will be reading them later. Are the compensation numbers I see on glassdoor in the ballpark?
Drop me an email (address in my profile) and I'll forward your resume right to the responsible party.
17 appear to be white men
9 appear to be women
Overall that seems somewhat better than usual for small tech companies. I'd say taking 'dsr's assertion that his colleagues come from diverse backgrounds at face value may be a reasonable charity to give him.
That's in contrast to "offshore development", where the US team is augmented by contracted development companies in some other part of the world.
We have sponsored H1B visas, on occasion. Employees are required to have the legal right to work in the US, and are expected to make their legal residence in the US.
Looks like a software engineer would need to pick up a second job to make up for Boston's cost of living.
You'll probably see some complaints about some teams in VMware, but it's been mostly a great place to work.
Also the team I was looking at worked on a type of product that while technically intriguing to me, makes me want to rip my hair out as a user lol.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've known first hand of 4 small companies where management asked employees to write 5 star Glassdoor reviews and which I know they were terrible places to work.
There's rarely going to be one company that is great to work for all around unless they're small to medium sized.