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Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?

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Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?

#31

Post by booleandilemma »

I've read that a good way to get an early indicator of future health is to pay attention to the spending on the small things.

Does your company have paid lunches?

Does it have a snack vending machine or something similar?

A coffee machine with k-cups?

Other little perks that seem insignificant but are nice to have.

If these things start to go away, the company is experiencing financial stress.

Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?

#33

Post by 31415 »

Treat it as a learning opportunity. Three buckets to triage employees into: (o) the oblivious employees, (i) employees who step up and show initiative, and (ii) employees who decide to goof off and do nothing since some of the management chain is likely missing and not being replaced.

Companies that are successful are often unwilling to risk any element of their success and can be rigid/inflexible.

Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?

#34

Post by striking »

booleandilemma wrote: post #31

I've read that a good way to get an early indicator of future health is to pay attention to the spending on the small things. Does your company have paid lunches? Does it have a snack vending machine or something similar? A coffee machine with k-cups? Other little perks that seem insignificant but are nice to have. If these things start to go away, the company is experiencing financial stress.

Steve Blank does a good job summarizing this and other related phenomena: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

(and its corresponding HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5751329)

Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?

#35

Post by wiz21c »

marketing team slices its customers pool into : customer-we'll-soon-contact, potential customers, potential leads, short-list-customers, customers with who we have very good relationships, customers who'll introduces to even bigger customers. You get it, many types of customers except the paying-type...

Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?

#36

Post by golergka »

If you're moving to a new open space office that looks for a visitor to be fantastic but is a pain to actually work in; if your company hires like crazy without a good idea of what new people will actually be working on; if a CTO that has been on-hands becomes distant and hires a level of middle technical managers — all that means that the company is trying to inflate it's value and be bought. Not necessarily a bad thing, but you can count on the culture shift pretty soon.

Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?

#37

Post by kzisme »

pgt wrote: post #18

Cutting of catered lunches is a strong signal that the company is in a cash crunch. You can try to propose a weekly catered lunch at your company to "encourage communication" and watch it is a signal. In the past I instituted weekly catered lunches at a company, which were halved from weekly to bi-weekly the moment finance knew there was trouble. Other indicators: delayed salary reviews, senior staff leaving (and not…

How often do salary reviews generally occur for someone working as a developer (or IT I suppose?)

Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?

#38

Post by avisser »

erikb wrote: post #24

Also relevant should be the question how to act in different phases. An unhealthy company is not necessarily dying. And even a dying company is not necessarily bad for you. It's like with real people. When someone dies some others start to check out the valuables to get the best for themselves. If you are working in a brilliant team inside a dying company, you may all get picked up, get a raise, and be welcomed into…

re: the product line - also, is it sticky/easy to migrate away? I've worked for places with products that were not great but had institutional customers who required acts of god to change vendors. We were okay.

Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?

#39

Post by VLM »

Many answers are negative assuming decline, or provide an extremely complicated answer to a simple problem. I'd propose based on decades of observation that you model the behavior and personality of all of management as if it was one person. Now is that imaginary merged individual person a lunatic deep in cocaine addiction psychosis? That might be a bad sign. Is that imaginary merged person a reasonable good leader? Sounds like a good sign. Is that one merged person in a civil war with its large number of multiple personalities? Run like hell.

This is what "real" culture fit actually is, whereas what culture fit means in 2017 as currently deployed is "we only hire young white ivy-league(-ish) males" which is a totally different concept or problem.

Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?

#40

Post by just4themoney »

kzisme wrote: post #37
pgt wrote: post #18

Cutting of catered lunches is a strong signal that the company is in a cash crunch. You can try to propose a weekly catered lunch at your company to "encourage communication" and watch it is a signal. In the past I instituted weekly catered lunches at a company, which were halved from weekly to bi-weekly the moment finance knew there was trouble. Other indicators: delayed salary reviews, senior staff leaving (and not…

How often do salary reviews generally occur for someone working as a developer (or IT I suppose?)

Usually once or twice a year for a seasoned developer, more frequent for jrs. That's been my experience.
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