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How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
91–100 of 167 posts
Re: How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meritocracy means those who have lucky breaks early in life (schooling, opportunities, etc) earn compound interest on those choices. If you could give everyone a "merit metric", and you had two options, one scoring 45 and one scoring 50, you'd chose the one scoring 50, without realising the the adversity the one scoring 45 has endured to get that far means they'll be operating at 55 or 60 in a year with the right env…
Sounds almost like you’re saying that it’s more meritocratic to hire for potential rather than actual/current skill. As I said, meritocracy is an ideal to strive towards.
There is a great documentary on Amazon called Rickover: The Birth of Nuclear Power
People on the show attribute the success of the team he built because he hired for potential. His quote was something to the effect of that all good people already have jobs.
Re: How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
#93At my current job, my second interview was with the CEO and his primary question was: Who are you? And he made it clear he did not want to hear about my education and career so far. We basically talked about our lives. This made me clear that he values people more than results. I understands that he has interviewed everyone who joined the company (which is now about 60-70 people). I am not saying that my job is witho…
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Re: How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
#94> You want to work at a company on a strong growth trajectory for lots of reasons, but a big one is your own growth potential. You will learn the most the fastest at places that are growing fast, and have way more openings for promotions and leadership roles than a slower-growing company.
I would argue this one is a bit more subtle and has some game theory dynamics to it. Yes, it is strictly true that faster growth means more promo opportunities, however it also can hide a lot of problems and obscure your individual contributions. And it's not just politics or optics—as an IC it's just harder for you to really see and understand the true impact of your own work.
In a rocket ship environment where the business trajectory has already been established, engineering skill is useful but not strictly necessary for success. A lot of people learn more about working the system than they do about how to actually build things.
In a company is hot enough that they can draw heavily from Stanford/MIT and FAANG veterans, you find a lot of folks who have not faced real adversity in their work-life. Many have a sense of entitlement about getting promoted on a regular cadence and are more concerned with their promo packet than the quality of their work.
By contrast, there is tremendous value to working in startups or smaller companies that have traction but not hyper-growth. In these places you can move faster and get faster feedback. Impact is viscerally seen in the product, not abstracted beyond massive user numbers divided over thousands of engineers. If you grow up in this environment and then go to a bigger company you can see things others can't because people who spent their whole career in a big company optimize for delegation and communication rather than end-to-end understanding. Whether this translates into climbing the greasy pole I'm not sure, but I think it does give you more options to control your own destiny.
Re: How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this is the classic thinking about these things. But working in a company where they keep bringing in new employees that are rude (the "strong woman" template), it has given me something to think about. It's just not a given that reducing out-groups makes a company culture better. It can make it worse to include those groups sometimes. It's just hard to know before. But it's morally right to not exclude people…
> keep bringing in new employees that are rude (the "strong woman" template), I've been working professionally for decades and I don't think I've seen this 'template' at all. And to be honest I'm wondering if this is a case of the 'same behavior is perceived as ruder in women than in men' effect.
It's pretty much in every tv show if you watch TV. Strong woman = rude woman. Which I think is so stupid. It's not strong to be rude to people. It's just bad behavior and turns you into a bad person.
It has gotten to the point that we now have "strong wimen" insulting men everywhere but if the tables are turned, men cannot be rude to wimen because that's completely unacceptable.
Re: How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
#96I'm out of line for asking someone at the end of the interview if they want to ask anything else we didn't cover?
If they allow you plenty of time to converse with your interviewers throughout the process, great. If they tack on a cursory “any questions for us?” while wrapping up, they don’t think it matters what you think of them. Pull the ripcord.
I see the word cursory, but if the company does anything cursory, isn't that a warning?
Re: How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience it can be a bit of a canary. People who are assholes tend to be extra-assholey to out-groups (which often is minorities). If members of minority groups don't want to work somewhere it usually means that the people who work there are assholes.
You haven't had enough jobs to make a statement like that, no one has. Your effortless translation of "90% white" to "assholes" is a bit of a tell. For instance, you're white, and used to thinking this kind of trashing a group of people is ok because of your socially dominant position. Because these whites resemble you physically right? But of course you mean the bad whites; you're one of the good whites! It isn't ok…
It's not a tell, I just used an example. Put any colors or genders in the example, the specifics don't matter for what I'm trying to say.
Re: How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meritocracy is a lie, a device to help rationalize the advancement of in-groups over other less privileged groups. An analogy: as a parent you should probably not reward purely on naked results; you should stimulate and reward effort instead. The first option just reinforces existing traits; the second empowers actual self-improvement. Not saying this is always easy or clear-cut. I understand the wish for getting rew…
How do I justify my career advancement as a non-privileged (according to woke standards) person w/o luck and the effort I put it to capitalize on that luck?
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Re: How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DEI people seem to me like they have a tendency to try to enforce their view via legislation. So I'm skeptical about the "market will decide" part.
Could someone comment on the down votes? The legislation is happening already, so I'm not sure why this is so controversial.
I didn't downvote you but I'll have a go.
The rabid activists who are pushing their agenda of mandated quotas for special interest groups do not like it when you or others like you suggest logic and rational things that don't support their agenda.
Hence, the downvote. More goodthink, citizen!
Re: How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a shibboleth virtue signal. Neither side takes it at face value
I wonder if we're headed to a point where this kind of self-selection basically creates companies consisting of either people who are all about DEI, or people who only care about skills/qualification, then the market will decide which one is the winning strategy.
There's a lot more groups of companies than that. There's companies which primarily select for people from the most prestigious school or for people with connections to people who already work there, or actively avoid the candidates the DEI people would prefer even if they're clearly the best option. Companies full of people who genuinely care only about skills and qualifications are very rare and generally don't stay that way for long. You only need one person in a position of power whose goal is to hire their friends for things to go wrong.