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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?

#281

Post by awsthro00945 »

dynamite-ready wrote: post #168
nomendos wrote: post #149

From 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 th…

You worked for all of these places?

I doubt it, considering their point about Amazon (the RSU backloading, not the hire-to-fire thing) is a misconception that only someone who has never worked at Amazon would complain about.

(probably some of the others too, but I only personally know about Amazon)

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

#282

Post by nomaroma »

hacktember wrote: post #270

I currently work at project44 and it's really nice here!

My former coworker is at Project44 and says otherwise… unfortunately. I was going to apply until they sent me this text:

“Exec team varies greatly in aptitude from what I’ve witnessed. Some are forward thinking, some appear to be in over their heads. Frankly, everyone is solely focused on sales or recruiting.”

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

#283

Post by JohnBooty »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #113

This is highly dependent on who you are as a person, but I'd honestly say most of the big tech firms excepting a few which you can suss out based on reputation. IMO people overestimate how much you can know about whether a team will be good over the span of 2+ years. I've had several friends land at a small company with what seemed like a great team and then the great manager was replaced by a bad one, the job starte…

    many places, such as Stripe, make it super easy to 
    switch teams for a better fit.
Another commenter mentioned that this is a strength of FB, and I find it amazing. I've not experienced that in my time in the industry though I've never worked for any "famous" technically-oriented orgs.

Don't misunderstand: I have a rock-solid belief in the importance of team fit. Nobody can do good work unless they're a good engineer and have found a good team fit.

I'm just amazed that any orgs actually pull this off, rather than simply considering somebody a bad hire. That's what I've always seen. Unless it was an engineer that had already succeeded at a given company for a number of years, and was faring poorly with a new team.

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

#284

Post by tway35 »

Koch Industries

Truly unique culture (go read Good Profit). Shockingly flexible organization, willing to do what’s best in the long run, and is investing tens of billions dollars in technology across numerous industries (Infor and Molex at one end of the spectrum and Flint Hills resources and Georgia Pacific at the other).

https://jobs.kochcareers.com/search/information-systems-and-...

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

#285

Post by AnonHP »

xiphias2 wrote: post #253
tedsanders wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a pretty excellent time at Netflix myself. The business model is refreshingly simple: people pay to watch shows they'll enjoy. As a result, our work is pretty aligned with our customers. No annoying ads, no selling data, no focusing on whales, no anti-consumer dark patterns (or at least not many). And Reed is an excellent CEO, imo. He's tried his best to build a culture that treats everyone as human and inte…

,, The business model is refreshingly simple: people pay to watch shows they'll enjoy'' I believe that this is true, but I also have a feeling that the main goal for netflix is maximizing views, and not maximizing the experience per supscriber weighted by user spend. In other words I would prefer less, but very well thought out and executed movies that focus on having a great story (like House of Cards until the main…

>> ,, The business model is refreshingly simple: people pay to watch shows they'll enjoy''

> I believe that this is true, but I also have a feeling that the main goal for netflix is maximizing views, and not maximizing the experience per supscriber weighted by user spend.

Not GP, but I believe Netflix has patterns to keep the subscriber in the app for as long as possible, including browsing through the list, adding things to an endless list, moving through the list of content just to avoid the trailer that would autoplay (this was around for years until it brought an option to disable the autoplay)…in other words, Netflix has focused (intentionally or unintentionally) on reducing the amount of actual content streamed while making sure the person isn’t using another streaming service for longer.

> …in opposed to Netflix’s Brave new world…

There are many titles on Netflix that are marked as Netflix Originals that aren’t produced by Netflix or even show up on Netflix first. Brave New World was a Peacock (the streaming service from NBC) original that was canceled after the first season. It was sometime after this that Netflix bought it and stamped it as a Netflix Original. I have no idea why Netflix bought it or how it relates to the book though.

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

#286

Post by smashed »

xiphias2 wrote: post #253
tedsanders wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a pretty excellent time at Netflix myself. The business model is refreshingly simple: people pay to watch shows they'll enjoy. As a result, our work is pretty aligned with our customers. No annoying ads, no selling data, no focusing on whales, no anti-consumer dark patterns (or at least not many). And Reed is an excellent CEO, imo. He's tried his best to build a culture that treats everyone as human and inte…

,, The business model is refreshingly simple: people pay to watch shows they'll enjoy'' I believe that this is true, but I also have a feeling that the main goal for netflix is maximizing views, and not maximizing the experience per supscriber weighted by user spend. In other words I would prefer less, but very well thought out and executed movies that focus on having a great story (like House of Cards until the main…

The auto play of movie trailers while browsing for titles irritates me to the core.

It's like I know I can't read the description longer than 3 seconds or else all these moving pictures that I don't want to see are going to start jumping at me.

I know it sounds like a 1st world problem but it made the Netflix experience unbearable for me.

I was ready to cancel my subscription.

Then I learned on this site while reading comments you can turn this off by logging in your account on the web.

These *&$ knew only geeks like me would be put off by auto-playng trailers. They knew only geeks like me would find the turn off setting. I hate Netflix, but I'm still paying. I hate myself.

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

#287

Post by brianwawok »

JohnBooty wrote: post #252
fbanon12341 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For general role hires, this is true, although it's a subset of all teams - teams with high priority roles pitch to you, you choose a couple to try out tasks for a few days. They stack rank, you stack rank, matches are made. Internal transfers after 1 year are pretty easy. I've seen people transfer earlier, if it's clear the fit between employee and team isn't there.

if it's clear the fit between employee and team isn't there. This is very interesting to me. How good is management at discerning between... a: "employee 12345 has been here for one year and probably wasn't a good hire" and... b: "employee 12345 has been here for one year, and they were probably a good hire, but they're not a good fit for their current team so let's get them to a new one!" ??? On a human level, I'm a…

Def seems hard to do. You could pass an A many times before ”proving” they aren’t going to fit in any team.

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

#288

Post by the_only_law »

davidw wrote: post #8

What I'd love to know is how to find the smaller more "hacker" oriented shops. I've worked at a few over the years... the kinds of places where everyone in engineering uses Linux desktops because that's the best choice for the work at hand and everyone's comfortable with it. Where the product is good, makes money, but is maybe kind of niche so the company isn't adding 10 people a week.

Everytime I see something like this I’m in no position to apply to it, and by the time I am there are no positions.

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

#289

Post by fartcannon »

Exorust wrote: post #255

I loved working at Microsoft. From a management that actually cares and understands dev struggles to great code review practices that don't waste dev time with bs. Plenty of opportunities to learn, switch teams if needed. I've seen people shift from team to team just because they wanted to add their expertise to another product. I'll admit, if you're a startup kinda guy you might find things a bit slower than you're…

Not only embraced, they've actually started the extend phase! A bit of extinguish, too, but only in a few situations (.net projects).

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

#290

Post by the_only_law »

zwieback wrote: post #19

This may be hard to believe for the HN crowd but hp has been great for me (Corvallis, OR). Sure, we're not the company Bill & Dave started but current leadership has steered the boat out of the mess created by 10+ years of rocky times.

I’ve seen some interesting looking roles with them and some of their child companies, I’m just weary of large legacy enterprises. My last job I sat around fora year while the project was delayed due to bureaucracy.
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