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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).
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.
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…
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 prob…
Well it's a tradeoff:
[growing pains] = [potentially valuable stock options]
[ever changing technical choices] = [not boring / not stagnating]
You'll probably see some complaints about some teams in VMware, but it's been mostly a great place to work.
But everything else about the company is super nice.
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.