Lies Employers Use to Get You to Work with Them

Some combination of luck and observation, and/or good social skills, might elucidate how the team's interactions go with other teams.

As mentioned above, a refusal to do this is a huge red flag. Even for a company like Google, which routinely does this. There are a zillion horror stories resulting from their closed allocation policy, like the hardware guy who was given a job doing vaguely hardware related Python programming. Without the option of moving to another team for 18 months per Google's policy (de facto if not de jure), he had no choice but to quickly resign to avoid ruining his career.

And I should mention what happened in my last job, where I wasn't able to do that, and the boss I was assigned to, who had absolutely no buy in, he wasn't given a choice about my working for him, took an instant dislike to me. That did not end well.

Echoing the theme of this subthread, for my last N jobs, in all but one recruitment I was substantially lied to. The one before that said I'd get enough time to review the org's long abandoned legacy software before a very firm (government contract) commitment to how long it would take to make it viable again.

Before that, the manager didn't reveal she'd taken an offer to move to a subsidiary that was splitting off. She guilelessly told me that the previous attempt to hire someone in my position failed because she'd mentioned that. That job ended when

The company before that had a pattern of hiring a "second" techie only after the current one had given notice, without telling prospects they'd soon be responsible for it all.

Two before that I learned later that my boss didn't want to hire me, but I was the only one who passed his whiteboard programming test (which for me was so easy I hardly remembered it by that time) and the company would have otherwise died, and I was fired as soon as they convinced the guy they really wanted to move from SV back to the D.C. area.

Before that, I joined a company just as a couple of devil investors took it over with what we soon enough learned was the express intent of owning all the company; they deliberately sabotaged the launch just to have 100% of nothing (granted, this was investor betrayal, in the denouncement 13 of us simultaneously resigned).

Before that, no bad faith can remember, at least starting out, and those jobs and organizations were substantially more successful. If this sort of thing has indeed become a pattern, we shouldn't be surprised by general economic stagnation, whatever the other secular causes there might be.

The "surprise/shock" that results from dealing with a cheating/dishonest entity is an instance of the confrontation between past and new Western standards for social trust. People are adapting to the fact that you cannot trust social entities as much as you did in the past.

I would like to add that this is almost certainly a consequence of having governments that don't respect their own laws and broke the sacred trust between them and their citizens. Politcians and government are leading by example, whether they like it or not.

It's always your option to quit if things aren't as advertised, and not worth salvaging. This means managing your finances and attitudes to be more mobile, and not basing your security and contentedness on the good will of your employer.

Bad employers act a lot like political candidates. The hiring process is the campaign, and once the votes are tallied and the position is locked in, the worker is subjected to things not quite as described. You never know what things are going to be like for your personal situation regardless of how much you read up on company experiences, so keep a fallback plan open, sacrifice to maintain a financial buffer, and don't get bogged down in your possessions and location.

This mindset is also useful even when your employer is great, in family emergencies and other life-upheaving events.