Perhaps someone can write a review-website for jobs.
They should call it glassdoor.
Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
81–90 of 447 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#82I work for a small software consultancy that was acquired by one of its clients. I'm the only engineer. No meetings, no micro-managing, wide variety of tasks, interesting technical challenges, sometimes no work. Bliss.
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#83Earlier 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.
Where have you been working at?
eBay, reddit, Netflix. But at reddit it was just the four of us and at Netflix we didn't really have product managers except in the UI area, but those folks were all super talented.
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#84Well I just tried to use glassdoor to try and grasp how it is to work at apple as a software engineer. Glassdoor is terrible. I think there is a business opportunity here. Make a site just for developers. Hackerdoors or something.
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Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#85I'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…
I've had good luck with this too. More diverse work, more free rein to experiment with stuff, less oppressive IT department...you can generally get away with telling 'Joe' to eat your ass if he wants to try to pull you into windows/AD only with no admin or WSL...
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#86I'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.
I switched to big Corps after a micromanaging owner and his yes-man CTO.
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#87This 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.
Surprised to see another Corvallis resident here (though I don't work for HP)
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#88I agree with other comments saying that this is going to depend on what you're looking for and on your personal situation -- there is no job that is right for everyone.
That being said, I recently joined Coda as an SRE, and I have really enjoyed it so far. Company size is in my personal sweet spot: the team is small enough that it still has the startup aspects of having visibility into everything happening in the company and being able to work on anything you feel is important, but it's big enough that things are relatively stable, there are lots of resources, there aren't fires all the time. The team is incredible: everyone I have worked with is extremely capable but also extremely nice and humble. Many people joined from highly unconventional backgrounds but Coda hired them for their passion for their roles. I have also felt that the company prioritizes employees in ways both big and small, from little things (e.g. every interview started with checking in to make sure the time was still okay, nice gesture with the chaos of online/remote interviewing) to big things like comp/equity (instead of stock options, you have the option to receive the equity as a grant, or as a loan if you don't have capital to pay the taxes on a grant, and you have the option to sell some stock in every fundraising round even though we aren't public). Several of the founders had kids while starting the company, so there was a strong culture of work/life balance from the beginning. We have our share of tech debt, but so far I have thought the codebase and tooling have been really high quality too.
Email in my bio if you want to chat.
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#89I 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…
why did you quit?
I started a startup a few days after I left. Also had a baby a few months before leaving and really liked the schedule flexibility when I was on paternity leave.
Re: Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
#90I 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...…
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