[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
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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 :-)
Author : edhowzerblack
Score : 189 points
Date : 2021-11-03 20:19 UTC (2 hours ago)
| chrisa wrote:
| The tricky thing about this question is that a great company for
| one person could be a terrible company for another, and vice
| versa.
|
| 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...
| kradeelav wrote:
| This is the right answer. The size of the company also often
| has a lot to do with different mindsets and what fits for some
| people. Some people like the relative stability of a large
| corporation (you're more of a "number" but you are more likely
| to be able take a paycheck and clock out mindlessly), the pace
| and learning curve of an agency/startup (higher risk/reward
| threshold, wildly wonky work-life balance), or even consulting
| as a different career path for more independent types.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| In my experience small companies tend to be the best to work for,
| but this varies wildly.
|
| 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).
| PaulStatezny wrote:
| This is accurate in my experience.
|
| Actually, I'd say you're lucky if you find a small company that
| isn't at least mildly dysfunctional.
| munk-a wrote:
| The silver lining with those dysfunctional ones, though, is
| that if you can clearly identify the issue your voice can
| probably carry enough weight (even as a new hire) to spur
| them to re-evaluate their process.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Yeah this is exactly why I like small companies... they're
| often not perfect, but you can do a lot as long as
| leadership is receptive to feedback (if leadership is bad,
| get out!).
|
| 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.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I don't like working for small companies as it can be seat of
| your pants stuff very often. A lot of them don't understand the
| concept of what a fire fight is and how to avoid if one occurs.
| You also don't have as much flexibility if you're on vacation
| and your role isn't well seconded. Stability is another issue
| unless it's flush with cash. It can be a crapshoot but
| obviously it depends. Anyway, my experience is this.
| xtracto wrote:
| > There's an offshore team in Traansylvania busy making it a
| legacy codebase
|
| As someone working for a US company in Mexico, I take offense at
| that :(.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| My company uses a lot of Eastern European developers and they
| are all fantastic--they jump right into the code and solve the
| problem, and they are in general a joy to work with.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| If we want to generalise:
|
| Eastern Europe is hit or miss. I had some good experiences
| and plenty of terrible ones (more so recently). I think that
| eastern Europe used to be good, but there are plenty of
| actors milking the scene and reputation of eastern Europe. I
| know 2 smart fellas making bank selling remote junior
| developers from Hungary and Poland to London clueless
| companies for slightly cheaper than senior London prices.
|
| India, middle east, south asia has been an absolute nightmare
| every time we tried.
|
| I think the future of outsourcing is going to be Russia: they
| can't speak English if their life depended on it but they're
| capable developers and paid ridiculously low. A few more
| years and people will start being a bit more fluent in
| English.
|
| This is still assuming the USA and Europe will still have any
| relevance - maybe they should start learning Chinese.
| toyg wrote:
| _> maybe they should start learning Chinese._
|
| Despite all the cool Matrix aesthetic, I dread to think of
| a programming language in Chinese.
| JeanSebTr wrote:
| Don't. The hiring company always has a role in those kind of
| situation. Maybe they picked the lowest bider, maybe they don't
| have good hiring criteria or just don't review the work being
| done make sense.
|
| We're in the process of hiring abroad and it's hard. The
| promise of better salaries does attract more candidates that
| need to be filtered but we think that if we care while
| interviewing, we'll get as good candidates that will be part of
| the team.
|
| Be proud of the work you're doing and don't take OP's anecdote
| as an absolute. But the situation described does happen.
| ProZsolt wrote:
| A good reason to go offsort is to increase the talent pool
| and maybe save some money A bad is to get the lowest bidder
| and usually get what you payed for.
| ProZsolt wrote:
| I've been in similar situation and I don't take offense at all,
| as I saw both side of the coin.
|
| I worked for an US based company through a Hungarian company.
| We were handled like normal employees. I was part of a US based
| team and reported for the team's manager. The only difference
| was that I had to go to my Hungarian manager for pay rises. The
| company got Mid/Senior employees for a Fresh Grad/Junior wage,
| which is still a great pay in my country. We delivered high
| quality software in a timely manner. Everybody was happy.
|
| But the company got greedy. They decided they can get engineers
| even cheaper from other countries and they went for the bottom
| of the barrel ones from those countries. The new engineers
| didn't cared about quality, they wanted to merge everything
| ASAP as the payed for delivered story points by their
| employers. Madness.
|
| The moral of the story is you always get what you pay for and
| the only ones who should take offense are the bean counters
| Volrath89 wrote:
| In my case it was the opposite. The code done by the devs in
| the US was awful, the code did not compile, they didn't use
| git, one guy had the "working" copy of the project in his
| laptop...
|
| We as the offshore team started to improve things a bit, we
| started using git, using CI pipelines to at least have the code
| always compiling, etc
|
| After some months the CTO fired all the US devs and everybody
| is now offshore. We haven't had many prod issues and we deliver
| things faster than the last team
|
| I guess my point is that it doesn't matter where the devs come
| from there are good and bad devs everywhere, if you hire good
| offshore devs they can be great
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I'm sure your team is different, but you must understand why
| people are generally so down on offshore development. Time zone
| issues and cultural issues tend to steal any and all gains you
| get by doing "salary arbitrage" between countries.
|
| I've been burned on this a couple times; right now, if I was
| evaluating new employers and I heard the words "our offshore
| team," I'd be out the door.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| As a non native English speaker, why is that offensive?
| airpoint wrote:
| They didn't say it's offensive. They took an offence -- as an
| individual. Insinuating that just because they're based in a
| budget friendly country it doesn't necessarily mean their
| output is of any less quality than that of their higher-paid
| counterparts (in the US presumably).
|
| Which of course is totally not reflective of reality grounded
| in stats or anything. It's just one in a thousand exception
| confirming the state of the tech world the OP has made a
| somewhat negative remark about.
|
| This my interpretation anyway. Both persons are right in
| their own way.
| iWillOffshoreU wrote:
| So the OP said that there was "a team in Traansylvania making
| it a legacy codebase". The literal meaning is that there is a
| team of developers in a foreign country being paid less to do
| the same job. The other guy said it was offensive because
| he's implying something similar. He's also working in a
| foreign country for a US business. More of a joke about being
| offended. At least that's how I'm reading it.
| oblio wrote:
| Hey! Don't diss the Transylvanian team!
| plow-tycoon wrote:
| PDFTron in Vancouver is alright. I didn't vibe with my manager or
| the rest of my immediate team well, but the rest of the company
| is alright with not much bureaucracy and some smart people
| working on a niche product. I burnt out in part because they had
| me do customer support while trying to deliver features, so I was
| terminated, but they're still alright if they can figure that
| out. I have ADHD and my manager didn't seem to understand how I
| couldn't get back to people on time, so I quickly learnt to
| resent coming into work.
| nwallin wrote:
| I work for Esri and it's great. (we do GIS -- geospatial
| information systems. Our customers include all 50 (US) state
| governments, like half the Fortune 500s, most national
| governments...) Virtually everyone has an office, no open office
| nonsense. There's no pressure to be a 10x developer or whatever,
| you just do your job. Nobody gets let go for being a mediocre
| developer. Everyone's hourly, so if you want to work 40 hours a
| week and go home, that's fine, or if you want to work 60 hours a
| week and get 50% more money that's fine too. It is, for the most
| part, a very chill, relaxed work environment.
|
| The owner is a good person. Big into environmental activism. The
| big company conference is mostly about all environmental
| conservation (also we added new features to our product). It's
| weird to work for a big company and get an e-mail from Jane
| Goodall at Christmas thanking us for the work we do.
|
| The money isn't great though, that's the biggest downside. But
| personally the money isn't that important to me.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esri
|
| https://www.esri.com/jobs
| nojs wrote:
| How long have you worked there, and have you had any experience
| with the international offices? I've heard a few bad stories
| and was surprised to see something so positive here.
| nwallin wrote:
| Coming up on four years. I know next to nothing about any of
| the international offices. I work on the main campus in
| Southern California, so that's basically all I know. I'm
| familiar with some of the smaller remote offices; some of
| them don't do the "everyone gets an office" thing.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Apiture.
|
| Fintech startup. Tech stack's recent. People are genuinely good
| and capable humans. Based out of North Carolina with an office in
| Austin, but 100% remote.
|
| Truly awesome benefits.
|
| I'm on the platform engineering team.
|
| And yes, Apiture's hiring. Let me know if you want to apply -
| pretty sweet referral bonuses, haha.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I'll start with some free QA: the Apiture website's favicon is
| still the WordPress logo on the search engines I checked :p
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| Yourself? Not to be snarky but whenever there is someone with
| another interest in play, conflict can arise.
| mikeryan wrote:
| I can say this with someone who's been his "own boss" for 11
| years. Clients suck as bad, if not worse then corporate
| overlords and at least corporate overlords are pretty
| predictable.
|
| "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.)
| kvz wrote:
| As a developer: Transloadit. Profitable. No investors looking to
| twist arms to make short term gains. Founders are in it for the
| long haul and developers so there's appreciation and time made
| available to refactor and write tests. Small team, large
| footprint. Remote. Open. 80% of resources are spent on open
| source. Disclosure: founder.
| dsr_ wrote:
| I work for a small financial SaaS in Boston. 30-50 people. Nobody
| offshore. I've worked here for 18 years and 11 months and a
| couple of days. Yes, we're hiring.
|
| 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.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Sounds heavenly! Is it worth putting a link to your company
| here?
| dsr_ wrote:
| If you're interested, I have an email address in my profile
| here.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That sounds interesting. Made me think of the Neoxam Boston
| office at first.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| In my experience, there's no substitute for putting in the hours
| of painstaking research: scouring job boards and sites like
| levels.fyi for companies you haven't heard of yet, exploring
| their websites, looking at the professional profiles and blogs of
| the employees, etc. Every once in a long while, you find
| something really legit - places like Brilliant, McMaster-Carr,
| Bitwise Alchemy. IMO the better the place the more likely it is
| to be somewhat under the radar
| jimmieego wrote:
| My friend built TrueUp (https://www.trueup.io/rankings). It has
| curated listings and rankings of companies related to diversity,
| ethical issues, employee happiness, and so on. This may be a
| useful tool when researching what companies to work for.
| penjelly wrote:
| This requires information about you that others dont have. What
| is "sucky" to you apart from your very short list? Some people
| thrive on hard work, others love the lax lifestyle of a cushy
| job. Best advice? Ask your former coworkers, you shared mutual
| experiences and likely have opinions to bounce off eachother. If
| you find they shared similar values, find out where they are now
| and how that experience is going. This also allows for
| conversations at length as opposed to a comment which may or may
| not be nuanced enough to be helpful.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > 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...
|
| These are all signs it's a company that happens to be doing tech
| instead of a tech company.
| fredley wrote:
| If you're looking for remote work (UK/EU) I can highly recommend
| my employer, Prolific. A business run with compassion as a
| fundamental. I've never enjoyed my work more. Drop me a message
| if you'd like to talk more.
| wbh1 wrote:
| I've really enjoyed working for Linode. We're a smaller company
| (~250 people total), but work on a global scale. I've found the
| work to be challenging but rewarding, leadership to be
| approachable and willing to listen, and the benefits to be great.
| Coming from a large higher education environment (where the
| "Information Services" department was 600+ people) it's
| remarkable how much better the culture is here.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Your docs are a treasure!
| klyrs wrote:
| If I knew, I'd work there already...
|
| 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.
| ruffrey wrote:
| Consider working for yourself under a corporation. Quick to be
| hired, fired, and fire your customers. You may be the best boss
| you've ever had.
| domh wrote:
| I work at a small API doc company called ReadMe, we're ~40 people
| currently and I've been here since we were 5 people. It's been
| incredible to see the company grow over the years. We hire
| excellent people who tend to stick around. We treat people with
| respect and give them the tools to succeed.
|
| We interview a little differently than most other startups
| (https://blog.readme.com/designing-a-candidate-focused-interv...
| ); we've always had very flexible working arrangements (even pre-
| Covid) and we have a modern codebase (Node.js + React) with high
| test coverage.
|
| I lead the engineering team now (but still write and review code
| regularly). We're hiring for a bunch of different roles across
| the stack (and a management position):
| https://readme.com/careers. My (personal) email is in my profile
| if you wanna have a chat!
| [deleted]
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| VMware has a lot of different teams working on very different and
| interesting problems. It's not listed with the FAANG companies,
| but it pays well and you won't feel like you're making the world
| worse off than it is.
|
| You'll probably see some complaints about some teams in VMware,
| but it's been mostly a great place to work.
| DLion wrote:
| Agree, VMware it's a very nice place where to work.
| jurassic wrote:
| VMware seems like a place where people work either less than 2
| years or 10+ years. If you can identify a niche for yourself it
| can be quite comfortable.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Big companies can be good or bad depending on which team you are
| part of. Also, your relationship with your manager ultimately
| decides your fate in most cases.
| stickyricky wrote:
| I work for a small software consultancy that was acquired by one
| of its clients. I'm the only engineer. No meetings, no micro-
| managing, wide variety of tasks, interesting technical
| challenges, sometimes no work. Bliss.
| openthc wrote:
| I've heard OpenTHC is pretty cool ;)
| ranger_danger wrote:
| obvious shill is obvious
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to
| Hacker News? We're trying for something a bit different here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| jedberg wrote:
| I loved every minute of my time working at Netflix. Great,
| talented coworkers who I could constantly learn from, management
| chain from bottom to top of former engineers, so they understood
| when you would say, "I worked on this for a week but have no
| results because it didn't work". Plenty of resources to do what
| you needed to do, and lots of autonomy to do what you thought was
| right. Very little process and upper management actively moved to
| eliminate what little process there was. Unlimited vacation time
| that was real -- management took long vacations to set an example
| and would actively encourage everyone to do the same. And of
| course a great paycheck which included 10%+ raises because they
| made sure that new people didn't make more than veterans.
|
| I'll be the first to admit it's not for everyone. As they say,
| they are a sports team, not a family. Perform well and be
| rewarded handsomely, perform poorly and get cut with a big check.
| I personally thrived in that kind of environment, where you
| always have to keep proving your value. But not everyone wants to
| work that way.
| dbancajas wrote:
| why did you quit?
| jedberg wrote:
| I started a startup a few days after I left. Also had a baby
| a few months before leaving and really liked the schedule
| flexibility when I was on paternity leave.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| There are very few companies (and sometimes few teams in large
| companies) who are driven to actually produce something better.
|
| Typically, these companies are startups/midsize pre-ipo companies
| that are determined to reach somewhere. Until the product(s) are
| well established, the engineering there is highly regarded - but
| often loaded with tech debt.
|
| Once the product is well established, it becomes a game of
| meetings where everyone just looks after their own self.
| buro9 wrote:
| Grafana is incredible. I was pleased with the conscious and clear
| hiring, the apparent calm and emotional safety exuded by those
| who interviewed. And then when I joined by the integrity and
| leadership, which has a strong vision and great execution,
| coupled with real empathy for engineers and our customers. I'm
| loving it and it stands as a very stark contrast to my previous
| roles, and I hear similar from my colleagues at all levels too.
| Lots of autonomy, space to do a good job, a learning and personal
| growth culture. The way above average number of smart people to
| learn from. It's always been remote so they get this right.
|
| What is more individual is that the rapid growth creates a lot of
| change, and that isn't for everyone so do bear in mind that YMMV
| depending on who you are but it really is a great place to work.
| toyg wrote:
| _> What is more individual is that the rapid growth creates a
| lot of change, and that isn 't for everyone_
|
| Tell me about it. The company I work for is literally a rocket
| in its sector, but that means I've had three different managers
| in a year. Every time I think I've mastered the stuff enough to
| relax a tiny bit, it all gets thrown out of the window.
| Definitely keeps me on my toes, but I'm not sure I'm growing as
| much as keeping my head above water.
| ksml wrote:
| I agree with other comments saying that this is going to depend
| on what you're looking for and on your personal situation --
| there is no job that is right for everyone.
|
| That being said, I recently joined Coda as an SRE, and I have
| really enjoyed it so far. Company size is in my personal sweet
| spot: the team is small enough that it still has the startup
| aspects of having visibility into everything happening in the
| company and being able to work on anything you feel is important,
| but it's big enough that things are relatively stable, there are
| lots of resources, there aren't fires all the time. The team is
| incredible: everyone I have worked with is extremely capable but
| also extremely nice and humble. Many people joined from highly
| unconventional backgrounds but Coda hired them for their passion
| for their roles. I have also felt that the company prioritizes
| employees in ways both big and small, from little things (e.g.
| every interview started with checking in to make sure the time
| was still okay, nice gesture with the chaos of online/remote
| interviewing) to big things like comp/equity (instead of stock
| options, you have the option to receive the equity as a grant, or
| as a loan if you don't have capital to pay the taxes on a grant,
| and you have the option to sell some stock in every fundraising
| round even though we aren't public). Several of the founders had
| kids while starting the company, so there was a strong culture of
| work/life balance from the beginning. We have our share of tech
| debt, but so far I have thought the codebase and tooling have
| been really high quality too.
|
| Email in my bio if you want to chat.
| version_five wrote:
| One challenge is that even in sucky workplaces, there always seem
| to be champions that will tell you how great it is. In part
| because it's a hard life focusing on how your job sucks and many
| people get good at being outwardly optimistic.
|
| 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.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > that even in sucky workplaces,
|
| 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?
| roland35 wrote:
| I had a team and project I really enjoyed for 4 years, then
| poof it was all gone when the executive team decided to buy a
| competitor and scrap our team. You never know what might
| happen!
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| IDK about 20k people companies, but they can have drastic
| influence into 2k companies.
| rockostrich wrote:
| I don't know, I think it's pretty easy to ask questions for
| this during an interview process even if you have those
| "champions". Just ask "what are the current pain points and
| things that can be improved about the company?" If they give an
| honest answer then take it at face value. If they just bullshit
| you by talking around the question or flipping the question and
| talking about a "good problem to have" then you probably don't
| want to work there.
| elwell wrote:
| > "good problem to have" then you probably don't want to work
| there
|
| Well it's a tradeoff:
|
| [growing pains] = [potentially valuable stock options]
|
| [ever changing technical choices] = [not boring / not
| stagnating]
| zekenie wrote:
| Honestly, I don't think it's possible to create a list like that.
| Certainly some companies are holistically better than others, but
| so so so much of it depends on an individual's manager, team,
| likes, dislikes and other externalities. Companies have better
| and worse moments, better and worse leadership, but if a company
| is a great fit for you today, it could be a bad fit in a couple
| of years.
|
| I 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?
| quadcore wrote:
| Well I just tried to use glassdoor to try and grasp how it is to
| work at apple as a software engineer. Glassdoor is terrible. I
| think there is a business opportunity here. Make a site just for
| developers. Hackerdoors or something.
| xtracto wrote:
| Glassdoor is terrible particularly for startups.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| cloverich wrote:
| teamblind.com is closer. Lots of good commentary on various
| companies and hiring processes. The site itself is god awful
| (slow, tons of feature creep) but there's some good content on
| it.
| mgas wrote:
| I am a Drupal developer for a government contractor. Management
| absolutely knows what the product is, and our PM knows the sites
| we build and maintain inside and out (both from a Technical and a
| UX/Design perspective). The pace is probably slower than a lot of
| devs are used to, and there are a lot of moving parts, but that
| is what it's like working around government hierarchy. I for one
| like the well-defined structure.
|
| It absolutely does not suck. The people involved are not hotshot
| CS grads moving from FAANG to FAANG trying to get salary boosts
| every 6 months. They've been doing this kind of work their whole
| lives, and just want stability.
|
| Also, that team in Transylvania are an excellent bunch of
| developers who've probably been doing CS since they were in
| middle school, so don't knock them for being foreign. Knock your
| company for offshoring their labor. Those Transylvanians are
| trying to make something of themselves and improve the standard
| of living in Romania. Case in point, I was one of them.
|
| The main takeaway is that who doesn't suck to work for depends on
| what you want. You want money? The people giving a lot of money
| probably only care about you inasmuch as you produce something
| worthy of your salary. Beyond that (and whatever 'perks' they
| pretend to offer), they don't give a rat's ass about you. You
| want to feel like you're part of something? Get involved with a
| small-ish team in a mid-size company with long-term clients. Your
| life will be part of a team, the company won't have too much
| middle management, and long term clients mean long term goals.
| Breefield wrote:
| Biased but I've been at ClassPass for 6.5 years for a reason.
| Everyone has such great attitudes and work life balance is really
| excellent.
|
| As someone working in the backend I'm super stoked to be able to
| work with Kotlin in our services.
| grcevski wrote:
| elastic
| distrill wrote:
| I've been at Facebook for about a year and a half. Before this I
| was at startups in the marketing and financial industries. We've
| been under scrutiny for the whole time that I've been there, and
| the company is pretty unpopular from a vocal population on here,
| but it's been really nice to work for.
|
| We obviously have job security, and I've been very impressed with
| the management chain above me. At least on my team, they all come
| from eng for a few levels until you start hitting VP roles. The
| fact that they were at least fairly recently technical helps with
| understanding some of the traditional pain points I've run into
| in the past in dealing with management.
|
| Everything is built in house, which does have some drawbacks but
| it's nice that we can interface directly with the people who are
| working on all of our tools. And everything has an API so there
| is a great amount of inter-tool integration. Developers get
| raises, on my team Eng has a big say in what the product is going
| to be, idk it seems like it checks all of the boxes you're asking
| about.
|
| Also it's kind of fun to see the company I work for get
| mercilessly memed all the time.
| somerando7 wrote:
| Agreed, liking it here so far. But you do have to make sure you
| get on an interesting team. I wouldn't want to be on a lot of
| different teams here.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| It also reorgs every six months.
|
| I was on Search. You either really like it, or you hate it.
| There's no middle ground.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Keep in mind that at any large company people's experiences will
| vary from team to team. I can read reviews about my job where
| people make it out to be the worst place on earth. Yet I think
| it's quite cushy and don't really have anything bad to say about
| it.
|
| There's rarely going to be one company that is great to work for
| all around unless they're small to medium sized.
| steve_taylor wrote:
| Have you considered that you might be unemployable? Don't take it
| the wrong way. It's a common trait of startup founders. A big
| part of their motivation is often that they don't want to go back
| to working for other people.
| davidw wrote:
| What I'd love to know is how to find the smaller more "hacker"
| oriented shops. I've worked at a few over the years... the kinds
| of places where everyone in engineering uses Linux desktops
| because that's the best choice for the work at hand and
| everyone's comfortable with it. Where the product is good, makes
| money, but is maybe kind of niche so the company isn't adding 10
| people a week.
| chaircher wrote:
| Live somewhere for a long time and in a close knit community.
| Eventually you hear through word of mouth long before you even
| consider applying.
| xyzelement wrote:
| One thing quick - this is incredibly subjective. I've worked in
| some amazing companies but there were always people on Glassdoor
| or Blind who found something to complain about.
|
| People are fundamentally different. Someone may really enjoy
| structure and being told exactly what they have to do. Others
| want ambiguity and open-ended challenges. Some want stability,
| some want opportunity. So when you hear someone complain about a
| company (or praise it, I guess) it's important to ask yourself
| whether this person's values and interests are similar to yours.
|
| Also keep in mind that people who are crushing it are much less
| likely to spend time talking about this stuff, while people who
| are not doing well/miserable have more incentive to vent. So
| often times it's not just subjective to the person but you're
| more likely to hear complaining than praise all other things
| being equal.
| almeria wrote:
| The flip side of this sentiment is expressed quite eloquently
| in a sibling comment. In fact, we might even say the commenter
| is "crushing it":
|
| _One challenge is that even in sucky workplaces, there always
| seem to be champions that will tell you how great it is._
|
| If I hear people say they are (or were) miserable at a certain
| job - I tend to take their word when they say there's a reason
| for it. Your take seems to be... they just ne'er-do-wells who
| are looking for something to vent about. But that's the
| difference between you and me, I guess.
| hospadar wrote:
| I work for ITHAKA (parent of jstor.org) and I think they are
| decidedly non-suckey: https://www.ithaka.org/
|
| - 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
| mietek wrote:
| Never forget JSTOR together with MIT drove Aaron Swartz to
| suicide.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
| dhosek wrote:
| Do you get free jstor access?
| pshc wrote:
| Stripe comes to mind. I haven't worked there so I don't actually
| know.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Delete
| pshc wrote:
| Haha wow I'm getting wrecked for that suggestion. Why?
| jedberg wrote:
| Probably because you didn't work there so you aren't really
| speaking from a place of knowledge.
| pshc wrote:
| It's true I didn't work there but I have friends who
| have.
| eitland wrote:
| In Norway you could do worse than working for Entur (I'm work as
| a consultant there and they are amazing, they are hiring, but I
| prefer being a consultant.)
|
| Edit after rereading: since you ask were we work, self promotion
| seems to be OK with you. I work in Computas. We are employee
| owned and in 4.5 years I have not had to deal with a single jerk.
| That feels quite amazing given what I'm used to.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| Google
| wanderer2323 wrote:
| Google is amazing.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I'm really enjoying Google too. The only downside to it is the
| challenges of working for a bigcorp: getting everyone to agree
| on what you want to do is a lot of work.
|
| But everything else about the company is super nice.
| m1117 wrote:
| Lol, this post is like 10 years late.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I have been at Shopify 1.25 years and really enjoyed it. It's a
| very engineering centric organization that is both ambitious and
| kind. While at the same time wanting to push the boundaries of
| commerce (and attracting people that want to push those
| boundaries) they also work to reinforce constantly work life
| balance, stepping away from work, and so on.
| advice_thrwawy9 wrote:
| I want to preface this by saying I would strongly heed the advice
| of version_five. All of the most toxic work places I've been at
| had cheerleaders that would tell you it was amazing.
|
| I have struggled with this issue for years and my approach was to
| build some heuristics based on where I've been happiest. I
| fundamentally believe the job landscape now for developers is
| just systemically worse than it was a decade ago, but these are
| things I've learned:
|
| - Are you treated with respect throughout the interview. All the
| companies I've been happiest at had interviews that were
| basically extended conversations (even if they had coding
| challenges). I always felt comfortable and respected, different
| answers than expected where treated with curiosity rather than
| skepticism. Above all else you need to honestly ask "are these
| people I want to work with everyday"?
|
| - B2B targeting larger customers tends to be much better than
| direct to consumer. Every "customer focused" team I've worked
| with is ultimately driven by a single moronic KPI, and ends up
| spending all of their energy trying to cheat users while
| convincing themselves that this is really good work. Large B2B
| contracts last for years and have a lot of revenue associated
| with them so there more room for thoughtful product development.
|
| - How important is engineering as you climb the ladder? Is
| technical leadership (especially above you) really technical? Are
| they the kind of people that still like hacking on projects,
| solving technical problems? At my happiest companies technical
| competence continues up the ladder as far as it can. Your direct
| manager should be someone that hacking on an unsolved problem
| with would be fun.
|
| - How financially healthy is the company? This doesn't mean "do
| they have a lot of funding", in my experience funding without
| fundamentals leads to weird behavior product wise as teams rush
| to please investors and come up with ways to survive. If
| investors and leadership and genuinely happy with the company
| there is a lot less pressure to do strange product things.
|
| - I used to think smaller companies were my favorite, but have
| found that a good small team in a large company can be just as
| good if not better.
|
| After several runs at some of the worst companies in my career I
| also felt it was impossible to find anything that was enjoyable.
| I'm currently at a place (that I won't name) where I finally
| enjoy going to work again, and feel no interest in dusting off my
| resume anytime soon. This above rules helped a lot with that.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I've never worked for a big famous tech firm, but I will
| absolutely tell you how I've managed to avoid hating work for 30
| years:
|
| Find a relatively small firm, still owner-run and controlled.
| Avoid public firms. A corporation cannot show loyalty, but a
| HUMAN can. A manager has no real control -- their manager can
| reverse them. When you work for the owner, you can trust things a
| bit more IF you're working for a trustworthy person.
|
| This means small. But it doesn't mean cheap. ;)
|
| That said, I've probably left money on the table working this
| way, and I'll never get IPO stock or similar, but stability and
| ethical behavior in a workplace go a LONG way.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| Went this direction once only to encounter nepotism and
| unwillingness to pay decently, but I have seen it work for
| some!
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Avoid public firms. A corporation cannot show loyalty, but a
| HUMAN can.
|
| Counterpoint: I work in a FAANG and the first thing I noticed
| what that I was just a small piece in a big machine. Everyone
| is replaceable. People change teams all the time, some leave
| the company after 6 months, only to re-join 1 year later... But
| it's actually a good thing! I don't have the same amount of
| stress I had when working in a small company.
| bovermyer wrote:
| This is good advice, with the caveat that the owner needs to
| not be a dick.
|
| I've worked in environments like this both with amazing owners
| and with truly horrifying owners.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| I switched to big Corps after a micromanaging owner and his
| yes-man CTO.
| edrxty wrote:
| Yeah, watch out for small companies that are desperately
| trying to get big but have been small or oscillated between
| 10-40 people seemingly from the beginning of time.
|
| There's a particular type of person who runs these businesses
| and that person is extremely common. They cannot delegate and
| micromanage everything so once they get beyond their ability
| to manage every facet of operations themselves, their
| leadership ability breaks down and a bunch of people end up
| leaving and the cycle repeats. They very often have
| temper/anger management issues as well.
| erdos4d wrote:
| I feel there is a story here...
| edrxty wrote:
| I've had good luck with this too. More diverse work, more free
| rein to experiment with stuff, less oppressive IT
| department...you can generally get away with telling 'Joe' to
| eat your ass if he wants to try to pull you into windows/AD
| only with no admin or WSL...
| davidw wrote:
| How do you find those? I've worked in places like this and
| loved it. Probably didn't earn as much as elsewhere, but it
| feels pretty good to show up to work motivated to work on
| something interesting.
| edrxty wrote:
| Startups obviously. Less obviously look for "SBIR" shops if
| you're ok with a little bit of weird gov contracting
| overhead.
| davidw wrote:
| Startups don't stay small though. They're aiming to get
| really big or have some kind of big exit in a hurry. Some
| of them are a lot of fun, some stay good even as they grow,
| others turn into depressing places to work.
| edrxty wrote:
| Honestly the biggest issue with this strategy is US
| capitalism isn't kind to companies that just stay small.
| You're not going to find a lot of places that want to
| remain tiny, just a lot that, as mentioned above, remain
| so through micromanagement.
|
| Maybe you get lucky and find a labor-of-love kinda place
| where someone is just trying to be really good at making
| one type of thing (highly niche products) but a better
| bet is to just find a comfy place, stay there a few years
| and help them get bigger, then leave and repeat.
| davidw wrote:
| I suspect that a lot of these companies just don't make a
| lot of noise, but quietly do their thing without being
| pasted all over the HN front page.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| My experience was the opposite, the only time I've ever had
| someone pay me late, and on top of that asked me to work for
| free was when I was dealing with a very small business owner.
| You either need to have some VC funding, or be a well-
| established company for me to even want to apply.
|
| I guess there might be some unicorn bootstrapped exceptions to
| the rule, but in general I find the bigger the company the
| smoother things are when it comes to actually getting paid.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| I've been having a great time at Apple. I joined a bit over two
| years ago (coming from a 7.5-year-long stint at google). The
| people are great, the work is very interesting. Highly
| recommended.
|
| 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
| orian wrote:
| Eric was great CEO and TGIFs were the thing ;-)
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Home Depot IT, surprisingly enough.
|
| Out of all the companies I've worked at, it was a surprisingly
| refreshing experience. I didn't know a company could be that big
| and that entrepreneurial at the same time.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| This is highly dependent on who you are as a person, but I'd
| honestly say most of the big tech firms excepting a few which you
| can suss out based on reputation.
|
| IMO people overestimate how much you can know about whether a
| team will be good over the span of 2+ years. I've had several
| friends land at a small company with what seemed like a great
| team and then the great manager was replaced by a bad one, the
| job started sucking, and everyone had to jump ship and go on a
| new job search. If it happens soon enough after you join you may
| not be able to leave for over a year for appearance's sake.
|
| At big companies, you can still get bad teams but many places,
| such as Stripe, make it super easy to switch teams for a better
| fit.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think employees wildly overestimate the negative resume
| impact of leaving any individual role "too soon". Your life is
| short and your career is shorter. Don't stay at a place that
| sucks.
|
| If you show up with one short stint, I might ask about it, but
| I'll totally understand a "it wasn't what I was expecting
| answer". If you have two of those with at least one 2-3 year
| stint (ideally including a promotion), that's also fine.
|
| The danger only comes when you have 5+ stints of 6-15 months in
| a row. That reads like you might have a performance/potential
| problem.
| ioseph wrote:
| Might depend on your country but federal government. Good pay,
| job security and a clear path for career progression.
| bergerjac wrote:
| This question is a Catch-22...
|
| I know a Mexican, who knew that his way out, was by getting in
| somewhere better. He applied to a German University, with zero
| experience with the German language. But on the application he
| lied and marked 'Conversational fluency'... he was accepted,
| leveraged his new location, and since has been the 1st CTO of
| multiple companies.
|
| The people who have a little bit of humble audacity & spontaneous
| enthusiasm, will find a way, and gravitate towards each other.
|
| The problem with this question, is trying to avoid companies that
| "don't suck"... instead, the aim is to find an amazing company.
| (Some readers will shrug off this distinction, and the successful
| will have an 'A-ha!' moment) Because amazing companies filter out
| average people who are only trying to avoid non-suckiness.
|
| Amazing companies hire amazing people.
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| GM. No really. Hear me out.
|
| Great work/life balance, benefits, and management structure.
|
| They're transitioning to remote work if your job allows it. A
| large percentage of the company is already work from home. I just
| got permission to go lower 48 US remote a few days ago.
|
| And they're doing a lot of really cool shit. Ultium. Cruise.
| Brightdrop. Almost no matter what your specialty, GM has it.
|
| I'm challenged every day. My coworkers are smart and driven. If
| you don't like what you're doing, you can move. A year ago I was
| a hands-on mechanical engineer with little coding experience who
| wanted to transfer to software. Now I'm a fully remote controls
| engineer.
|
| Mary Barra is a hell of a CEO. She's forward-thinking and isn't
| afraid to push the company in the direction she thinks it should
| go in, and so far, she's been right on the money. She champions
| diversity, and it's not just for show. Barra has transformed GM
| from a stodgy good-old-boys garbage-producing shitshow into an
| innovation powerhouse, the world hasn't recognized it yet.
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| Primer.io has been quite nice so far. I'm writing this from one
| of our twice yearly workcations in Tenerife. Our fully remote has
| gotten together in an Airbnb, basically all expenses paid for to
| chill work and have fun together.
|
| The product is very interesting and innovative. The teams are
| well organized and quite self sufficient. And there are huge
| challenges to overcome in every aspect of the company. Anywhere
| you look there is something you can do to make it better.
| riffic wrote:
| county libraries.
| quadcore wrote:
| Haha. Wait, are you serious?
| maxshm wrote:
| IMHO: 1. Company should be small. I worked in a few small
| companies. One have grown to headcount above 200 and became a
| swamp full of unmotivated people. 2. There should be great team
| members. 3. Founders should be software people or engineers.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Midsize companies are great, but they're not for slackers
| because people there actually expect you to work. However, if
| you do actually work, they're good for that.
| a-saleh wrote:
| Red Hat.
|
| Worked there as an intern during college, continued for few more
| years and returned there after a brief stint at a startup.
|
| Work/life balance is great, most code public has so many
| advantages and colleagues are friendly and decent humans.
|
| Some teams might be worse than what I experienced, but even if I
| was growing mildly frustrated (i.e. pressure from product people
| to push product out of hte gate before it was ready and I was one
| of hte damned QA people), the robust internal transfer system
| meant, I could just move to a team where I felt my contribution
| was more valued even from non-programmers ;)
| irrational wrote:
| I've spent 20 years working for a non-tech Fortune 500 company.
| Frankly I've loved my job the entire time. Excellent pay and
| benefits, chill managers, fun coworkers, beautiful campus (back
| when we worked on campus in the before times ;-), interesting
| projects, given time to learn new skills, amazing work-life
| balance, etc.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I ended up at Shopify by way of a small startup I was at being
| acquired. I didn't know much about the company at the time
| thinking it was basically an ecommerce website builder. I don't
| think I would have chosen it on my own. I usually go for tech-
| heavy startups with significant technical challenges whether it's
| building up the product or scaling it up and the tech plays a
| large part of my interests. I ended up working at a Ruby/Rails
| shop once before and I didn't like it at first and got used to it
| while I was there. The RoR at Shopify is much more structured the
| way I would expect a good team of engineers would build something
| rather than a one-off solo dev. There's also a fair amount of in-
| house tech so it's Shopify-flavored-RoR. This is fine, but all
| pretty subjective.
|
| The parts that I think most would find positive is that the
| company is very transparent internally with high alignment from
| executive through development. Management is technically aware
| for companies of any size and especially for a large one. Most
| decisions are easy to understand and rarely (if ever, can't
| remember one) has caused me internal conflict of interests.
| Regardless of the tech used, I haven't gotten bored or needing a
| challenge for very long. Each new project presents new
| challenges, that's left for the team to research, prototype, and
| build. I spend very little time in meetings, and usually only
| those I want to addend (e.g. team standups, tech talks, show n
| tells).
|
| Subjective downsides: the company is remote (not '-first' or 'for
| now', but always for everyone) though team IRL events are +1. The
| main tech is RoR, MySQL, Go, Redis, Kafka, Elasticsearch. Some
| groups (e.g. data) use other languages/tools. Of course there's
| also lots of front-end web/mobile dev that has the challenge of
| building an extensible platform. Spending time on related
| opensource work is good. I made some contribs to Sorbet type
| checker.
|
| Long reply, in short I usually leave a startup after 1.5 - 2
| years because it doesn't have anything more for me. I'm coming up
| on 3 years now.
| zippergz wrote:
| The flip side of "management don't know what they want the
| product to be" is "management decided what the product should be
| 3 years ago and won't adjust to the current reality, even though
| the company is failing." Be careful what you ask for.
| stevage wrote:
| Or management lets the latest big customer decide what the
| product will be.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That's at least epsilon better than constantly letting the
| _next_ big customer decide.
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps someone can write a review-website for jobs.
| id wrote:
| They should call it glassdoor.
| zwieback wrote:
| This may be hard to believe for the HN crowd but hp has been
| great for me (Corvallis, OR). Sure, we're not the company Bill &
| Dave started but current leadership has steered the boat out of
| the mess created by 10+ years of rocky times.
| bkberry352 wrote:
| Surprised to see another Corvallis resident here (though I
| don't work for HP)
| throwawayaussen wrote:
| Australia focused, but Canva is the best place I've ever worked.
| Varied engineering challenges, upper management and product
| managers respect engineering decisions. Smart coworkers, great
| perks, the office (optional) is the best. Metrics are hockey
| sticking so it's exciting being part of something big in a
| country where that is rare. No brilliant jerks is my favourite.
| cprayingmantis wrote:
| Come work with me at nCino! We're a Banking SaaS company based on
| Salesforce and AWS . Wait don't stop reading yet! We're working
| on a ton of neat products for banks and everyone I've ever worked
| with here is top notch! I can't think of one person I have worked
| with that I wouldn't want to work with again. nCino treats it's
| employees very well from your first day here you're part of the
| team, generous pay, benefits, and they're always flexible. In
| short if you want to work with great people at the top of their
| game who will help you get to the top of your game, in a great
| environment email me!
| chad_strategic wrote:
| Worst job I have ever had was easily the Marines.
|
| It took me 20 years to get out.
| xtracto wrote:
| > Project managers don't know anything about technology
|
| In my 10+ years of experience, that's the rule rather than an
| exception. It is _very rare_ to find a Project /Product manager
| who actually has decent technical knowledge. I think I've found
| one or two in my whole career (one is now product VP, the other
| moved to Switzerland).
| jedberg wrote:
| Maybe I've been really lucky, but every product manager I've
| worked with or know personally is deeply technical. I can't
| imagine being successful in the job without that skill.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| I'm sure you can imagine! Elsewhere in the thread you say you
| worked at Netflix, so perhaps you have spent most of your
| career in high-calibre companies with high hiring bars. Now,
| imagine PMs at 2nd and 3rd tier companies. Note that the
| qualifications for being a PM are...nothing really. So any
| kid with a university degree and a vague interest in working
| in tech, but with no technical skills can apply and get in as
| a PM. Congratulations, you have now imagined how bad these
| people can be!
| zippergz wrote:
| Product management and project management are very different
| career tracks (or at least, they should be); it's much more
| common to find technical backgrounds in product managers than
| project managers. I'd almost go so far as to say that if a
| company has project managers working with software teams, I'm
| not really interested in working there. Some situations do
| benefit from it, but my experience is that it's usually a
| sign of either a company that doesn't understand software
| development, or such a messed up situation that it will be
| impossible to succeed.
| fudgy wrote:
| Where have you been working at?
| jedberg wrote:
| eBay, reddit, Netflix. But at reddit it was just the four
| of us and at Netflix we didn't really have product managers
| except in the UI area, but those folks were all super
| talented.
| Volrath89 wrote:
| I think all jobs suck in some way or another. The best approach
| in my opinion is to not worry too much about it, work just the
| required 8 daily hours and try to enjoy life outside of work.
|
| If you feel you are not getting good enough raises, just look for
| another job. The market is hot atm.
|
| If the codebase is that bad and the offshore team is making it
| worse, see my last paragraph. Honestly I've many times considered
| quitting because of an awful code base
|
| If you really like/enjoy programming and feel bad because in the
| job you can't program the way you want then make your own side
| projects, they don't need to be for profit.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Check out Noom. Super nice people, strong ethics and mission and
| a focus on employee satisfaction. Bonus points: parabolic growth
| trajectory.
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