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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?

#151

Post by dustintrex »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #13
version_five wrote: post #6

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 o…

> 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 e…

Yes, if the new CEO decides to fire all the management who has been there for a while, replace them with his buddies, and drastically lower the hiring bar so the buddies can hire their buddies.

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

#152

Post by dustintrex »

a-saleh wrote: post #102

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…

How is assimilation into IBM going?

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

#153

Post by itake »

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…

counter point: after working for small owner-run companies where the owner took everything personally, I will forever only work in big tech.

The owner ran the show and was emotional. Every time a competitor launched something new, they would change course and race to copy them. Ended up delivering nothing and eventually laid off after 1.5 years.

At a big company, everyone is spending someone else's money and the people at the top realize they can't (and shouldn't!) change course every 3 mo.

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

#154

Post by b0bd0bbsb0b »

Whoever pays the most. At some point most of us get inspired by WuTang and take the "Cash Rules Everything Around Me" mentality. Work is where we trade our bodies and our limited lifespan for money 8-12 hours per day. I personally just shut my brain off or detach completely, get my work done, then get back to my life.

Whoever pays the most sucks less. Otherwise, all things being equal, all companies are going to suck, especially if you work for yourself.

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

#155

Post by bogomipz »

PaulStatezny wrote: post #31
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).

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.

Agreed. I'd be curious what people count as "small" these days though. Less than 100? Less than 50?

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

#156

Post by jp0d »

I've been working for Xero since three years. It's a great place to work. Free barista coffee, fruits and social gathering every Friday. Everyone is very helpful and nice. Waiting to move into a brand new office here in Melbourne, AU. It's great to work for a company that cares about ethics and governance. We've to jump through several hoops before we can do anything with customer data. I have a lot of freedom in terms what tools to choose for my work. I've never had such experience working for big IT consulting companies prior to Xero.

Disclaimer: I'm a current employee here. I'm a data analyst! I haven't been asked or paid to write this. haha.

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

#158

Post by bogomipz »

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…

I'm definitely familiar with Esri, they've been around a long time. Full time people are paid hourly though? Do people negotiate their own hourly rate or is it set?

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

#159

Post by jhatemyjob »

advice_thrwawy9 wrote: post #97

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,…

> All of the most toxic work places I've been at had cheerleaders that would tell you it was amazing. I'm currently at a place (that I won't name) where I finally enjoy going to work again

These two statements made me realize the premise of this thread is flawed. Thanks for saving me some time.

> I fundamentally believe the job landscape now for developers is just systemically worse than it was a decade ago

I have this hunch as well. I tend to think it's because of proprietary monopoly platforms like iOS, AWS, etc forcing bad habits on everyone. Everything is so noisy these days.

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