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Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

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Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#101

Post by somewhat_drunk »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#102

Post by a-saleh »

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 ;)

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#104

Post by davidw »

edrxty wrote: post #98
davidw wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Startups obviously. Less obviously look for "SBIR" shops if you're ok with a little bit of weird gov contracting overhead.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#106

Post by jokethrowaway »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #77
xtracto wrote: post #45

> 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 :(.

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#108

Post by micromacrofoot »

munk-a wrote: post #33
PaulStatezny wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#109

Post by sys_64738 »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #21

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).

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.

Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

#110

Post by giantg2 »

dsr_ wrote: post #24

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 s…

That sounds interesting. Made me think of the Neoxam Boston office at first.
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