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.
Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
141–150 of 447 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#142I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#143Australia 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.
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> maybe they should start learning Chinese.
Despite all the cool Matrix aesthetic, I dread to think of a programming language in Chinese.
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#145I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#146I'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…
Went this direction once only to encounter nepotism and unwillingness to pay decently, but I have seen it work for some!
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#147I'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…
> 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.
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 ab…
I worked there! Canadian company. Seemed very determined to stay a small company while having huge aspirations.
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#149From my experience:
- NVIDIA seems to have best balance of culture of competency, work satisfaction vs how well is run, although it is getting more bureaucratic as it grows
- Google used to be good in many aspects but now things are deteriorating
- Facebook is mixed bag, where Oculus part is more of a wild west and main FB is still ok better than Google
- Amazon other than "hire to fire" (loading your RSUs towards the end and then raising the bar to force you out before main RSU chunk gets vested) is a mixed bag
- Intel is with a royally broken culture, rampant nepotism and crooked HR (just try to google HR flagging employees "THIEVE" just so they do not get re-hired regardless of their performance and also read in the Oregonian news about age discrimination where they mopped large number of actual best engineers - no wonder they lost the edge and are sinking further, not sure if the current CEO who is the best thing that happened to them can save them anymore. My bet if he does not do HR and culture cleanup, he won't be able to do much. The only hope for Intel is geo-political move of the fab manufacturing to the US but even that will have mixed effect.)
- Apple is mixed bag, with some teams better and some worse and all suffering from culture of secrecy
All in all in each company you can find a good team with a good manager/director/VP as well as you can find bad ones. All pay competitively, where Intel is at the bottom followed by NVIDIA although case by case for higher grades both can compete if needed.
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#150Stripe comes to mind. I haven't worked there so I don't actually know.
I'd love to hear firsthand comments on Stripe.