91–100 of 447 posts
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.
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.
There's a particular type of person who runs these businesses and that person is extremely common. They cannot delegate and micromanage everything so once they get beyond their ability to manage every facet of operations themselves, their leadership ability breaks down and a bunch of people end up leaving and the cycle repeats. They very often have temper/anger management issues as well.
> 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 :(.
We're in the process of hiring abroad and it's hard. The promise of better salaries does attract more candidates that need to be filtered but we think that if we care while interviewing, we'll get as good candidates that will be part of the team.
Be proud of the work you're doing and don't take OP's anecdote as an absolute. But the situation described does happen.
It absolutely does not suck. The people involved are not hotshot CS grads moving from FAANG to FAANG trying to get salary boosts every 6 months. They've been doing this kind of work their whole lives, and just want stability.
Also, that team in Transylvania are an excellent bunch of developers who've probably been doing CS since they were in middle school, so don't knock them for being foreign. Knock your company for offshoring their labor. Those Transylvanians are trying to make something of themselves and improve the standard of living in Romania. Case in point, I was one of them.
The main takeaway is that who doesn't suck to work for depends on what you want. You want money? The people giving a lot of money probably only care about you inasmuch as you produce something worthy of your salary. Beyond that (and whatever 'perks' they pretend to offer), they don't give a rat's ass about you. You want to feel like you're part of something? Get involved with a small-ish team in a mid-size company with long-term clients. Your life will be part of a team, the company won't have too much middle management, and long term clients mean long term goals.
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…
People are fundamentally different. Someone may really enjoy structure and being told exactly what they have to do. Others want ambiguity and open-ended challenges. Some want stability, some want opportunity. So when you hear someone complain about a company (or praise it, I guess) it's important to ask yourself whether this person's values and interests are similar to yours.
Also keep in mind that people who are crushing it are much less likely to spend time talking about this stuff, while people who are not doing well/miserable have more incentive to vent. So often times it's not just subjective to the person but you're more likely to hear complaining than praise all other things being equal.
I have struggled with this issue for years and my approach was to build some heuristics based on where I've been happiest. I fundamentally believe the job landscape now for developers is just systemically worse than it was a decade ago, but these are things I've learned:
- Are you treated with respect throughout the interview. All the companies I've been happiest at had interviews that were basically extended conversations (even if they had coding challenges). I always felt comfortable and respected, different answers than expected where treated with curiosity rather than skepticism. Above all else you need to honestly ask "are these people I want to work with everyday"?
- B2B targeting larger customers tends to be much better than direct to consumer. Every "customer focused" team I've worked with is ultimately driven by a single moronic KPI, and ends up spending all of their energy trying to cheat users while convincing themselves that this is really good work. Large B2B contracts last for years and have a lot of revenue associated with them so there more room for thoughtful product development.
- How important is engineering as you climb the ladder? Is technical leadership (especially above you) really technical? Are they the kind of people that still like hacking on projects, solving technical problems? At my happiest companies technical competence continues up the ladder as far as it can. Your direct manager should be someone that hacking on an unsolved problem with would be fun.
- How financially healthy is the company? This doesn't mean "do they have a lot of funding", in my experience funding without fundamentals leads to weird behavior product wise as teams rush to please investors and come up with ways to survive. If investors and leadership and genuinely happy with the company there is a lot less pressure to do strange product things.
- I used to think smaller companies were my favorite, but have found that a good small team in a large company can be just as good if not better.
After several runs at some of the worst companies in my career I also felt it was impossible to find anything that was enjoyable. I'm currently at a place (that I won't name) where I finally enjoy going to work again, and feel no interest in dusting off my resume anytime soon. This above rules helped a lot with that.
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…
How do you find those? I've worked in places like this and loved it. Probably didn't earn as much as elsewhere, but it feels pretty good to show up to work motivated to work on something interesting.
I've been at Facebook for about a year and a half. Before this I was at startups in the marketing and financial industries. We've been under scrutiny for the whole time that I've been there, and the company is pretty unpopular from a vocal population on here, but it's been really nice to work for. We obviously have job security, and I've been very impressed with the management chain above me. At least on my team, the…
I've been at Facebook for about a year and a half. Before this I was at startups in the marketing and financial industries. We've been under scrutiny for the whole time that I've been there, and the company is pretty unpopular from a vocal population on here, but it's been really nice to work for. We obviously have job security, and I've been very impressed with the management chain above me. At least on my team, the…
I was on Search. You either really like it, or you hate it. There's no middle ground.