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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?

#131

Post by nojs »

nwallin wrote: post #122

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…

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.

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

#133

Post by 999900000999 »

ubermonkey wrote: post #62

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 trustwo…

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.

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

#134

Post by toyg »

buro9 wrote: post #127

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…

> 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.

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

#135

Post by dsr_ »

monktastic1 wrote: post #48
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…

Sounds heavenly! Is it worth putting a link to your company here?

If you're interested, I have an email address in my profile here.

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

#136

Post by nwallin »

nojs wrote: post #131
nwallin wrote: post #122

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…

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.

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.

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

#137

Post by Volrath89 »

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 :(.

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

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

#138

Post by almeria »

xyzelement wrote: post #96

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…

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.

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

#139

Post by airpoint »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #103
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 :(.

As a non native English speaker, why is that offensive?

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.

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

#140

Post by ProZsolt »

JeanSebTr wrote: post #93
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 :(.

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…

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.
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