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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?

#421

Post by jeffyang »

ryloric wrote: post #420
jeffyang wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at Facebook. I understand the vitriol. It's very easy to paint that picture. It's a very one-sided picture though. Hands down, of all the companies I've worked for, I've never met so many rank and file people who cared about doing the right thing so much. Most jobs are just jobs. People do their jobs and they get money and sometimes they try to do a good job. And there are plenty of people like that at…

This almost reads like someone paid you to write this.

Ha really? I mean, no one paid me, but thanks?

Seriously, have you ever worked at a place where people (outside of leadership) care strongly about making sure the company does the right thing rather than just accepting the status quo? That's pretty rare I would say and it was very surprising to me.

I'm not saying that Facebook is good. I'm just saying that people paint it like everyone who works at Facebook made a decision to support an evil empire, which does a disservice to all the people there who are working really hard to do the right thing.

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

#422

Post by rp1 »

Infinitesimus wrote: post #413
rp1 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you’re saying, but focusing on non-work things and working at a big tech company are not mutually exclusive. You can do the same amount of work and make a lot more money.

Right, but some people don't care about making a lot of money.

Sure, but all else equal, wouldn’t you rather earn more? That’s what I’m saying: all else is equal.

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

#423

Post by Jugurtha »

jedberg wrote: post #53

I loved every minute of my time working at Netflix. Great, talented coworkers who I could constantly learn from, management chain from bottom to top of former engineers, so they understood when you would say, "I worked on this for a week but have no results because it didn't work". Plenty of resources to do what you needed to do, and lots of autonomy to do what you thought was right. Very little process and upper man…

That is a great endorsement, and what could be the shortest impressive résumé:

>I used to run reddit.com's servers, then I ran Site Reliability at Netflix.

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

#424

Post by sofixa »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #365
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…

> no anti-consumer dark patterns (or at least not many) There's plenty of those. They removed the star ratings, they don't show IMDB or other external ratings, nonsensical categories, things that still autoplay even with all autoplay options off (e.g. when selecting an episode in a series). They keep producing average to bad content and keep pushing it in front of you without any option to filter it out. And the thin…

> And they keep removing non-netflix content. I was under the impression they don't have much choice and actually it's the copyright owners pulling their content to have it exclusively on their new shiny streaming service, or at the very least demanding exorbitant amounts from Netflix to allow them to keep certain things (e.g. Friends).

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

#425

Post by kubanczyk »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #106
dudeinjapan wrote: post #77

Earlier 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…

If we want to generalize, Russia is in Eastern Europe, as is Kazakhstan or Ukraine. (Yes, I'm aware some of these have also huge area in Asia.)

On the other hand it's more useful to classify countries like Hungary or Poland as Central Europe, because of timezone and because they have been EU members for more than 15 years.

There is just less difference between Warsaw and Berlin than between Warsaw and Moscow, so the old dichotomy First World vs non-First World is no longer that useful to understand what's going on.

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

#426

Post by jp0d »

fphhotchips wrote: post #363
jp0d wrote: post #156

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 ter…

I don't work for Xero but I have worked with some of the data team and can honestly say that they've hired some of my favourite people in Melbourne to work there, and no one I don't like. High quality team that I hope I overlap with some day.

Thank you. Glad that you've enjoyed working with us. I can confirm that everyone I meet here have been wonderful human beings! I can safely say that it's a big part of the hiring process, without giving up too much details. :)

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

#427

Post by awsthro00945 »

ToxicMegacolon wrote: post #344
awsthro00945 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RSU vesting schedule at Amazon is nonstandard but it's not an issue. You may only vest 5% of your RSUs in your first year, but everyone is given a significant monthly cash bonus to make up for it. The compensation strategy at Amazon is that you always make the same "target compensation" each year, even your first. You aren't shortchanged just because you vest less RSUs in your first year. An example with numbers:…

Since we are talking numbers, I am gonna do some hypothetical calculation. Lets assume two employees A and B, their numbers are as follows: A - $150k Salary + $150k RSU -> TOTAL = $300k B - $150k Salary + $30k RSU + $120k cash bonus -> TOTAL = $300k Also lets assume the year is 2017, specifically around Oct 2017 when AMZN price was ~$1000 ($1002 on Oct 13 2017) With a price of $1000, A gets 150 RSU Units and B gets 3…

Your math seems right, but again you're neglecting the $120k cash bonus in your calculations.

>Price of A's RSU on Nov 3 2021 - $3384 * 150 = $507,600 Price of B's RSU on Nov 3 2021 - $3384 * 30 = $101,520

This is the correct price of the RSUs, but again, neglects the cash bonus. If you look at it (more correctly) through the lens of "the amount of compensation given", the price of A's RSU+bonus is $507k, and the price of B's RSU+bonus is $221k (your $101k + the $120k cash).

But! There's no reason that the $120k cash just has to stay cash forever. If you're considering the stock appreciation of the RSUs, you also have to consider the appreciation of what you can do with the cash. For example, if you're one of the Amazonians that just gets the cash bonus all paid up front, then you just take the $120k and buy 120 AMZN stocks to go along with the 30 you were granted as RSUs, and you end up with the exact same 150 stocks ($507k) at the end of 4 years. There's no difference. If you get paid the cash bonus monthly instead of up front, then you would come out a little behind since you can buy less AMZN shares as time goes on, but not as drastically as your numbers make it look.

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

#428

Post by fbanon12341 »

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…

One way to side step the issue - trust the hiring process. I haven't seen very many issues, but Meta seems to give people multiple chances, on multiple teams, under multiple managers, before doing a pip (or whatever the equivalent is).

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

#429

Post by PragTob »

Remote(.com)

I've only been here for ~6 months but it's been one of the most incredible places to work at for me.

Everyone is kind (kindness is a core value), proactive and helpful. People take real time off in which they are unreachable (even the CEO & CTO), taking more time off is highly and really encouraged.

I get a lot of Ownership (another value) over what I do and how I do it - I do a lot of stuff that's not connected to my team at all, I criticise the way we do things and well... it's highly appreciated and my opinion is valued and we actually change things.

I just had my first performance review with my manager and what he put as the highlight of my last 6 months is a post I made about how people should not work over hours and take vacation.

This culture has utterly fascinated me. I've been at places where they said they had these values but really didn't, so far either remote is tremendous at faking me out or it's really that great. Which to be honest I'm still sometimes skeptical about as it can't be that good ;)

Oh. And yeah on the side I work fully remotely still have a great connection to my colleagues and we work on something important that helps workers and companies that I actually care about.

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

#430

Post by thirdsun »

sofixa wrote: post #424
Sander_Marechal wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no anti-consumer dark patterns (or at least not many) There's plenty of those. They removed the star ratings, they don't show IMDB or other external ratings, nonsensical categories, things that still autoplay even with all autoplay options off (e.g. when selecting an episode in a series). They keep producing average to bad content and keep pushing it in front of you without any option to filter it out. And the thin…

> And they keep removing non-netflix content. I was under the impression they don't have much choice and actually it's the copyright owners pulling their content to have it exclusively on their new shiny streaming service, or at the very least demanding exorbitant amounts from Netflix to allow them to keep certain things (e.g. Friends).

You are correct. It's strange to criticize Netflix for owners pulling their content.
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