81–90 of 169 posts
Don't give notice yet. Instead, take a week of vacation and start the new job during that week. Make your official decision during afternoon tea on Sunday.
https://levels.fyi to make sure the level/comp accurately represents what i'm looking for
This is absolutely fascinating. I don't know how folks are earing this kind of cash when you can go to a recruiter, with more than decade of hands-on startup experience, and when you want more than 200k a year they look at you like you just kicked their cat. Then you see someone at a place like Lyft with four years of real world experience and one year with the company pulling 300-400k a year without breaking a sweat…
If you're not already considered top-tier talent, I think Amazon is the easiest way into this right now. They are hiring at an incredible rate, and their engineers are generally considered good hires by Google, Facebook, etc. The lifestyle and working environment is generally considered acceptable if not exemplary.
Also, invest some time to become an expert at technical interviews. They are somewhat orthogonal to everything else that we do, but they are a near-universal shibboleth at top companies and it doesn't take that much time to get good at them. Most of the questions fall into a few broad categories that you can learn to recognize with practice.
This worked for me. YMMV. The key was relaxing the requirement that I stay in my childhood city, although luckily I only had to move a couple hours away.
Don't give notice yet. Instead, take a week of vacation and start the new job during that week. Make your official decision during afternoon tea on Sunday.
Nor can I think of a company that would agree up front to let a new hire do this. Why would you hire people who screw over their employers? They might do the same to you one day when they have decided to leave.
This is a great way to start out with two jobs and end up with zero.
Crunchbase to get current and former founders/execs, last rounds etc. Company website for investor relations page if exists, SEC and regulatory filings to get financials, technology roadmaps, prospectuses, etc. Then avoid pinging anyone on linkedin other than to find who the core informal network that runs the company is. Find out: 1. Revenue and runway before next funding round or profitability. This trumps all in p…
>2. Whether board members and executives still have skin in the game and holding their stock. If board is full of early shareholders who have already been made whole, chances are you aren't their next unicorn, there is no explosive growth, and they've checked out. Expect executive level bullshit politics related to their short term compensation milestones. Can you elaborate on that?
Most of the other comments here cover the majority of useful tips/techniques. However for me, one thing I really like doing is reaching out to employees who quit/left. Ask them for honest information about why they quit and what the existing problems are.
The baseline approval rating from someone who left the company is going to be lower than people working at the company. If an ex-employee is disgruntled or bitter it doesn't tell me that much, unless I hear the same complaint from a lot of people.
If someone left because another great opportunity came along, and they are really positive about their time at the company, I'd say that's a good signal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd just end up mistaking commits to my private repositories for work. Also, private contributions have to be enabled in order to show up there.
Isn’t it a bad idea to use the same account for work as well as personal projects? Currently I have a separate ‘home’ account for personal projects and I never touch the work ID from my home.
https://levels.fyi to make sure the level/comp accurately represents what i'm looking for
This is absolutely fascinating. I don't know how folks are earing this kind of cash when you can go to a recruiter, with more than decade of hands-on startup experience, and when you want more than 200k a year they look at you like you just kicked their cat. Then you see someone at a place like Lyft with four years of real world experience and one year with the company pulling 300-400k a year without breaking a sweat…
You can (sometimes) use GitHub to figure out if the company has bad work/life balance, e.g. if you see lots of employees committing code on the weekend on the same dates: https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/01/31/does-company-have-wo...
1) Keep in mind that during the interview process, you are (read: should be) interviewing them, as much as they are interviewing you. If you sense they don't realize / respect you being an equal in the process then put a note under "red flags."
2) Along the same lines, listen careful during the process. Listen for that is said, and often more importantly, what is not said. Again, be mindful of how they speak with you or maybe it's more like at.
3) Every process has at least one Q&A segment. Prepare some questions. Bring them along printed out if you want. When the moment comes, ask away. If you'd like to speak to current team member(s) ask for that. If you sense friction, that's at least a partial answer. Noted in the red flags column of your "post-date" analysis.
Of course this won't uncover everything, but it's a start. It's also likely yo generate more questions. Do a follow up, if necessary.
For example, yesterday I had a phone call with the head of small marketing / design agency about some PT (but regular) contract dev work. During the course of the conversation I said something like "...and perhaps in time, there can be a junior dev who can take care of some of the more simplistic stuff and I'll focus on the heavy lifting..."
His reply was along the lines of "That doesn't interest me. I'm looking to deal with only one person."
However, what I heard was: "This guy is not aware of the fact that I want to outgrow the mundane stuff and/or I might be willing and able to move into a supervisor position. It also sounds like he's not interested in growing the business in ways where there would be more heavy (dev) lifting. Perhaps my ambitions and desire to grow wouldn't be a good fit."
We're still talking. But that one answer told me __a lot__ even if he didn't realize it. Those are the type of "not said" things I'm talking about.
Ultimately, you are both looking to enter into a LTR. They should want - should things move forward - you to be comfortable and confident they are "the one" for you. If they are resistant to you having __relevant__ and __professional__ questions, then again, that's a signal. Make note of it, and weight it when the time comes.
If you're a software engineer (or will work closely w/ engineers), I built Key Values ( https://www.keyvalues.com ) to help w/ this. Before building KV though, my research process included looking for and reading: - the company's career and about us pages - an active blog w/ recent posts (w/in the last 2 months) - LinkedIn / Twitter / GitHub of founders and existing team members (I'd also look for any old blogs writt…