Blind is really invaluable for getting the inside scoop at companies large enough to have an active presence on that app.
I spent so much time on Blind when I was jumping ship
Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?
131–140 of 169 posts
Re: Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?
#132Please keep in mind that the tips/tools/techniques that people list are highly subjective and may not be applicable everywhere. I realized this from my own experience (worked at two startups in the past, and now at BigCo): * Glassdoor: Sort reviews by date (people are relatively happy when they join, negative reviews tend to be more current). Take every review (good/bad) with a grain of salt. Reviews with higher "hel…
I agree. The more proactive you are about reaching out or asking the right questions, the more you'll know. Thanks for the detailed suggestions.
I personally think Glassdoor is pretty outdated. Blind is more 'real time'
Re: Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?
#133Glassdoor
I heard that HR departments get paid to write on glassdoor.
Re: Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?
#134> Do you email people who work there? No. They'll rarely tell you anything useful because they'd risk their job. Focus on former employees instead if you really must. (And only stick to recent ones if you do, because companies change.) But IMHO you don't actually need to do this nowadays. > Do you just jump in and hope for the best? Absolutely not. At the very least check out their website, their execs, and your futu…
Point of clarification here: emailing friends or former colleagues that work somewhere is a great idea. Ask them what they think. If they're in town, have coffee with them. They will provide you an honest assessment.
You may also be able to network to someone that works there to get their impressions of the place. Like most job-related things, networking is critical.
Re: Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?
#135I used to use Blind.
Unfortunately, it has devolved into a kind of clean cut version of 4chan.
The topics discussed there used to be about how the culture was at a certain company, total compensation, etc.
Now it is a place where the topic of discussion are memes about Indians being incompetent with women, why can't I get laid, I'm so lonely etc.
LinkedIn, AngelList, and Crunchbase are some good places to start to get an idea of the company.
Re: Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?
#136Crunchbase 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…
Thanks, the points you make are very important. Specifically, on "... executive level bullshit politics related to their short term compensation milestones ...", I would like to add, this one is the hardest to figure out and has a significant impact on your growth not just within the company, but as a person in general. Any more suggestions, on good ways to find out if this is part of the company culture?
Slightly uncomfortable responding to everything in the thread, however, inferring comp milestones is the hardest one.
Public companies are easy because it's all public.
Interesting documents are SEC 8-K's, which are unscheduled filings about material changes to the business. Ask yourself why a couple of times to get to the reasons behind it. Volatility means uncertainty, and uncertainty often implies a power struggle. Nowhere is perfect, but adjust your expectations about how much chill to expect. Read a lot of them to get a sense of what's normal.
If the execs are stacking equity in a public company and only selling to pay taxes, that's a pretty good sign everyone is committed. It's also a sign that there isn't a lot of volatility, and with that stability, growth may be slow, so expect growth opportunities to be commensurate and feel out the trade off.
Huge disclaimer that these are just tea leaves, but to reply to another comment here, you are investing 3-5+ years of your life and your reputation into a company, where a VC is just allocating maybe 1/30th of their fund. You have more to lose as an employee than that investor does. Just keep an eye for the longer term.
Most of us are just happy to get a gig, work with cool people, get paid very well and dream about upside, but when you evaluate every 3-6 months working at a job as opportunity cost against validating an idea against possible market fit, you start looking hard at the trade offs.
Based on crunchbase profiles, if a founder is present, but demoted or marginalized ("special projects"), find out if there is a technical lead who can't say yes, but who can say no to everything. Not a dealbreaker, but a culture variable.
If the founders are out of the picture, ask about tech debt and whether company has enough new runway to stand up a new platform. If not, it means they're hoping to grow their way out, and ask if there's a roadmap for that play. If they don't have an answer, just expect competing priorities as it's going to be very sales driven, with customer/sales politics.
If the CEO or other execs have been there for more than 3 years without profit or a new financing round, who is protecting them and why? (hint, board, running dumb money, possibly angling for sale, not explosive market dominance.)
Window dressing to attract acquirer attention causes insanity on teams because managers have do things to appear positioned, and they are under pressure to "produce," metrics to keep the ball in the air. My experience was it causes rage quits and makes people enemies for life. The pattern of leadership angling for a sale, but must swear they are not makes everyone seem psychotic.
I'm not an authority on this, I happen to write and this is what I've observed.
People behind all this aren't evil, it's just some incentives can be used as tea leaves to get a sense of what questions to ask before you give up 6-10 six-month iterations and pivots on launching your own idea for some snacks and a foozball table. :)
Re: Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?
#137If 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…
Lynne, KV is a great tool! Thanks a lot for that. If you find time, would love to see -ve metrics as well. That would cover both aspects of a job search: what am I looking for, and what am I looking to avoid.
Re: Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?
#138Used to use Glassdoor, but it has become progressively more rude/pay-walled over the years, and they allow more paid employer astroturfing than they used to. I suppose that's just a sign of the times, and I don't necessarily have a grudge against the company for doing so. It does however mean that the site is no longer useful to this end, at least for me. As for directly contacting a company, I tend not to. Sometimes…
It seems pretty obvious that something is off when a company has 50/50 good and bad reviews, with the bad ones offering a ton of detail, and the good ones way too positive and overly "corporate" with no detail.
Yep, the fastest way to spot a fake positive review is to notice those seem to be written from the perspective of HR, focusing on things like "fast growth" and "lots of opportunities" that are of little to no concern for the typical person, especially if they're listed as the sole positives. A typical dev is less concerned with the growth rate of the company and how many offices are opening in places thousands of miles away -- they're more concerned about their local delivery team, their local office, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?
#139Crunchbase 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…
Is this advice for employees? Or VC's? I've NEVER had to do this for any of the jobs in my 20+ years as a software developer ... but there are some interesting points indeed.
What is the difference? Employees invest their time and careers into a company. For career growth, it is much better if your company is also growing. Grow or Die.
Re: Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the whole idea of Github Teams. You just add/remove users to teams and subteams as an organization Owner, and you never get access to anything else on their account or even see their private repos or other organizational memberships.
Except that one is still likely using a company-owned laptop/desktop to access that account. Any data or activity on company hardware (such as private keys or cookies) should be considered visible by them as there’s likely to be remote management software, an IT admin account, encryption key escrow, etc. The legal precedent (in the U.S., anyway) gives an employee no expectation of privacy on a company computer or net…
It would still be a CFAA violation for the employer to use those keys to act as the employee against a third-party serivce like Github. So the employee might not be able to object to them seeing that, but they would have no right to use them to access the employee's account on a remote server. Just like if they found a check on your desk they can look at the numbers, but they can't just use them to take money out.
Also, you could and probably should create a new SSH key on the company laptop or a personal access token for HTTPS access so that it can be easily revoked when you leave.