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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?

#71

Post by ubermonkey »

xtracto wrote: post #45

> There's an offshore team in Traansylvania busy making it a legacy codebase As someone working for a US company in Mexico, I take offense at that :(.

I'm sure your team is different, but you must understand why people are generally so down on offshore development. Time zone issues and cultural issues tend to steal any and all gains you get by doing "salary arbitrage" between countries.

I've been burned on this a couple times; right now, if I was evaluating new employers and I heard the words "our offshore team," I'd be out the door.

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

#72

Post by fudgy »

jedberg wrote: post #56
xtracto wrote: post #44

> Project managers don't know anything about technology In my 10+ years of experience, that's the rule rather than an exception. It is very rare to find a Project/Product manager who actually has decent technical knowledge. I think I've found one or two in my whole career (one is now product VP, the other moved to Switzerland).

Maybe I've been really lucky, but every product manager I've worked with or know personally is deeply technical. I can't imagine being successful in the job without that skill.

Where have you been working at?

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

#73

Post by mietek »

hospadar wrote: post #10

I work for ITHAKA (parent of jstor.org) and I think they are decidedly non-suckey: https://www.ithaka.org/ - Great benefits - Very transparent leadership - Nonprofit (501c3) - long-term sustainability of the org & product are major goals which (IMO) makes for much better project/team/personal incentives - Remote work for any position, but also offices in Ann Arbor, NYC, and Princeton - Education-oriented mission

Never forget JSTOR together with MIT drove Aaron Swartz to suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

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

#74

Post by bovermyer »

Apiture.

Fintech startup. Tech stack's recent. People are genuinely good and capable humans. Based out of North Carolina with an office in Austin, but 100% remote.

Truly awesome benefits.

I'm on the platform engineering team.

And yes, Apiture's hiring. Let me know if you want to apply - pretty sweet referral bonuses, haha.

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

#75

Post by stevage »

zippergz wrote: post #69

The flip side of "management don't know what they want the product to be" is "management decided what the product should be 3 years ago and won't adjust to the current reality, even though the company is failing." Be careful what you ask for.

Or management lets the latest big customer decide what the product will be.

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

#76

Post by bovermyer »

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…

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.

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

#77

Post by dudeinjapan »

xtracto wrote: post #45

> There's an offshore team in Traansylvania busy making it a legacy codebase As someone working for a US company in Mexico, I take offense at that :(.

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.

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

#79

Post by domh »

I work at a small API doc company called ReadMe, we're ~40 people currently and I've been here since we were 5 people. It's been incredible to see the company grow over the years. We hire excellent people who tend to stick around. We treat people with respect and give them the tools to succeed.

We interview a little differently than most other startups (https://blog.readme.com/designing-a-candidate-focused-interv... ); we've always had very flexible working arrangements (even pre-Covid) and we have a modern codebase (Node.js + React) with high test coverage.

I lead the engineering team now (but still write and review code regularly). We're hiring for a bunch of different roles across the stack (and a management position): https://readme.com/careers. My (personal) email is in my profile if you wanna have a chat!

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

#80

Post by stevage »

zippergz wrote: post #67
jedberg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I've been really lucky, but every product manager I've worked with or know personally is deeply technical. I can't imagine being successful in the job without that skill.

Product management and project management are very different career tracks (or at least, they should be); it's much more common to find technical backgrounds in product managers than project managers. I'd almost go so far as to say that if a company has project managers working with software teams, I'm not really interested in working there. Some situations do benefit from it, but my experience is that it's usually a…

I'd say that the best project managers I have encountered were non technical. They were able to defer to technical people when needed but always kind of kept an arms length from it and it worked well.
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