Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

471 points by edhowzerblack 4 years ago | 426 comments

I've moved around quite a bit these past several years and I feel like every company has been the same. Management don't know what they want the product to be. Project managers don't know anything about technology. There's an offshore team in Traansylvania busy making it a legacy codebase. They don't want to give developers raises...

I see "Who's Hiring?" threads and "Who Wants To Be Hired?" threads. How about a "Who Doesn't Suck To Work For?" thread?

Not sure if this will take off or get deleted ...but if it does take off, it would be great if developers --not recruiters-- replied to this. Tell us why your company is a good place to work so we can apply there :-)

jedberg 4 years ago |

I loved every minute of my time working at Netflix. Great, talented coworkers who I could constantly learn from, management chain from bottom to top of former engineers, so they understood when you would say, "I worked on this for a week but have no results because it didn't work". Plenty of resources to do what you needed to do, and lots of autonomy to do what you thought was right. Very little process and upper management actively moved to eliminate what little process there was. Unlimited vacation time that was real -- management took long vacations to set an example and would actively encourage everyone to do the same. And of course a great paycheck which included 10%+ raises because they made sure that new people didn't make more than veterans.

I'll be the first to admit it's not for everyone. As they say, they are a sports team, not a family. Perform well and be rewarded handsomely, perform poorly and get cut with a big check. I personally thrived in that kind of environment, where you always have to keep proving your value. But not everyone wants to work that way.

tedsanders 4 years ago | |

I've had a pretty excellent time at Netflix myself.

The business model is refreshingly simple: people pay to watch shows they'll enjoy. As a result, our work is pretty aligned with our customers. No annoying ads, no selling data, no focusing on whales, no anti-consumer dark patterns (or at least not many).

And Reed is an excellent CEO, imo. He's tried his best to build a culture that treats everyone as human and intelligent - minimal red tape, lots of flexibility, wide transparency with data & strategy, very focused business, and he even encourages middle management to cut down on big meetings.

Lastly, it's nice to work at a place where you can count on everyone to be competent. It's expensive to pay well and not hire juniors, and it can also mean that 'senior' employees end up doing 'junior' work, but it also means that your colleagues are usually solid, which is nice.

Not to say everything is perfect, but overall I've been satisfied with Netflix. I still might leave for another company someday, but if I do, it will because that other company is also great, not because Netflix is sucky to work for.

Sander_Marechal 4 years ago | | |

> no anti-consumer dark patterns (or at least not many)

There's plenty of those. They removed the star ratings, they don't show IMDB or other external ratings, nonsensical categories, things that still autoplay even with all autoplay options off (e.g. when selecting an episode in a series).

They keep producing average to bad content and keep pushing it in front of you without any option to filter it out. And the things they produce that are worth watching are hidden in a stream of junk and cancelled after season 3, usually without a satisfying ending, because Netflix structures their contracts in such a way that they would have to pay a lot more after season 3.

And they keep removing non-netflix content. They said themselves, they want to become HBO before HBO can become them. Well, I don't want HBO. I want a Spotify for video content where I can watch everything in one place. Old netflix was just that. I refuse to pay for multiple streaming services at the same time. Yo-ho and raise the flag.

xiphias2 4 years ago | | |

,, The business model is refreshingly simple: people pay to watch shows they'll enjoy''

I believe that this is true, but I also have a feeling that the main goal for netflix is maximizing views, and not maximizing the experience per supscriber weighted by user spend.

In other words I would prefer less, but very well thought out and executed movies that focus on having a great story (like House of Cards until the main character was kicked out of the series). I would still pay the same amount of money for those few movies than a person who's binging on all new lower quality and lower budget series. I loved the movie Dune for example, where the story made sense, in opposed to Netflix's Brave new world, where even my girlfriend who read the book said that the movie doesn't make any sense, and it has nothing to do with the book itself, and totally ruined it, as the movie series had no story.

Can you tell me if Netflix focuses on total views for a movie, or rather tries to estimate the revenue by dividing user spend by the number of movies the user watched?

yibg 4 years ago | |

I’ll second this. Netflix was one of my favorite places to work as well for mostly the same reasons. Having said that I do hear they are getting bigger and things have changed somewhat recently. So YMMV.

Edit: it’s also nice to not have ethical concerns with your choice of employer.

RNCTX 4 years ago | | |

> Edit: it’s also nice to not have ethical concerns with your choice of employer.

Did you not happen across the predatory soliciting of new content? In that by attending a Netflix "screening event" you give Netflix a right to use your film in perpetuity, royalty free?

i_am_proteus 4 years ago | | |

Are you immensely pleased.

mixmastamyk 4 years ago | |

Just be prepared to apply and never hear back from them, even with twenty years of internet company and vfx experience. Absolutely nothing, not even a “no thanks,” for all the time wasted on their job site.

halfmatthalfcat 4 years ago | | |

Applying through company websites is usually a black hole. For whatever team you’re applying for, try to find the team lead/manager/etc and hit them up on social media. Obviously be prepared to sell yourself but getting hold of a human usually fares much better than applying through whatever portal.

Jugurtha 4 years ago | |

That is a great endorsement, and what could be the shortest impressive résumé:

>I used to run reddit.com's servers, then I ran Site Reliability at Netflix.

dbancajas 4 years ago | |

why did you quit?

jedberg 4 years ago | | |

I started a startup a few days after I left. Also had a baby a few months before leaving and really liked the schedule flexibility when I was on paternity leave.

vmception 4 years ago | | |

All FAANG/MANGA are two years stints. Its a common experience but of course many people stay longer and are comfortable with that traditional view of being married to a corporation.

A) Netflix is an ideal first company in the Silicon Valley circuit because their compensation package is a simple formula of <every other FAANG’s compensation package but in all cash>, which makes negotiating the next place much easier because you’re more liquid already and already know what the total compensation should be - or would balk at any other base salary because the cash portion is so much lower, forcing companies to entire you with more shares than they were prepared to. And B) because you simply made enough money to attempt something else in your life.

SavantIdiot 4 years ago | |

I'd like to work for Netflix. It's one of my favorite services, and after talking to a principal who was with them through the 2000's, the challenges they face are fascinating. I feel like I'd be doing a net positive for the world since so many people rely on it for peace of mind.

loxias 4 years ago | |

Cool! Is it still like that, even today? Netflix is possibly my "reach" job, based specifically on what I've read about the culture.

I'm about equally split talent wise between "mathy things" (signal processing) and lower level systems engineering. "video & image encoding" or "research scientist - algorithms engineering" look hot to me.

mprime1 4 years ago | |

Same here. Loved my years at Netflix. Great colleagues building robust systems and management is there to help. If I were to ever go back to big tech, this is where I would try first.

zz865 4 years ago | |

I know its a trope here, but why are there a lot of devs in Netflix. I'd think you'd need a few dozen people. Plus basically what has changed in 10 years?

icco 4 years ago | | |

I don't work there, but If you're being serious:

- maintaining the number of clients alone is a gargantuan task. Almost every TV manufacturer has a different OS, and many TV models have different OS, plus all of the different consoles, phones, etc - The pure engineering of pushing that many bytes around the world 24/7. - Then storing information about those users for advertisers. https://netflixtechblog.com/revisiting-1-million-writes-per-... - Security, because if they are found negligent (ie making it easy for people to make illegal copies), there goes their business. - Constant product tweaks on the above thousands of clients to make the UI experience consistent across clients. - Performance improvements to keep users engaged. - AI that surfaces what customers want. - Data storage to deal with all of the content they have. - Dynamic content serving based on where in the world you are. - etc.

gaws 4 years ago | |

So why did you leave?

ubermonkey 4 years ago |

I've never worked for a big famous tech firm, but I will absolutely tell you how I've managed to avoid hating work for 30 years:

Find a relatively small firm, still owner-run and controlled. Avoid public firms. A corporation cannot show loyalty, but a HUMAN can. A manager has no real control -- their manager can reverse them. When you work for the owner, you can trust things a bit more IF you're working for a trustworthy person.

This means small. But it doesn't mean cheap. ;)

That said, I've probably left money on the table working this way, and I'll never get IPO stock or similar, but stability and ethical behavior in a workplace go a LONG way.

dsr_ 4 years ago |

I work for a small financial SaaS in Boston. 30-50 people. Nobody offshore. I've worked here for 18 years and 11 months and a couple of days. Yes, we're hiring.

The best thing about the company are the people who are already here. The basic hiring criteria are "clever, competent and kind". That doesn't mean we never have disagreements, but they tend to be technical disagreements about the best approach to reach the same goal. Before the pandemic, and hopefully after it, the kitchen was the center of the company: casual questions turned into great discussions, explanations... there's a big whiteboard wall in the kitchen, and it got used a lot.

That goal, incidentally, is to drive down the cost of good portfolio analysis until it's within everyone's reach. We're succeeding: there are clients who have programs where people start their investments with $50/week.

Our folks are reasonably diverse in terms of background and talents. There's a robust co-op program. The benefits are pretty good -- fully paid health care premiums -- but it's definitely the people that make it great.

monktastic1 4 years ago | |

Sounds heavenly! Is it worth putting a link to your company here?

dsr_ 4 years ago | | |

If you're interested, I have an email address in my profile here.

AYBABTME 4 years ago | |

What does "Nobody offshore" means here?

dsr_ 4 years ago | | |

We don't outsource our employees. All development, IT, etc is in-house.

That's in contrast to "offshore development", where the US team is augmented by contracted development companies in some other part of the world.

We have sponsored H1B visas, on occasion. Employees are required to have the legal right to work in the US, and are expected to make their legal residence in the US.

mraza007 4 years ago | |

Just curious if you don’t mind can you share the name of the company you work for

dsr_ 4 years ago | | |

I work for Smartleaf -- www.smartleaf.com

giantg2 4 years ago | |

That sounds interesting. Made me think of the Neoxam Boston office at first.

version_five 4 years ago |

One challenge is that even in sucky workplaces, there always seem to be champions that will tell you how great it is. In part because it's a hard life focusing on how your job sucks and many people get good at being outwardly optimistic.

That said, it would be nice to see more authenticity than what mostly gets posted in the hiring thread, and on company websites. I'm sure we each have our own criteria of what kind of info we'd like to see, but I rarely see anything more than the usual bromides.

Honestly, I've found glassdoor to be pretty good if you've had a few jobs before. It's pretty easy to find which reviews to discard, and read between the lines for red flags even in places that are relatively highly rated.

distrill 4 years ago |

I've been at Facebook for about a year and a half. Before this I was at startups in the marketing and financial industries. We've been under scrutiny for the whole time that I've been there, and the company is pretty unpopular from a vocal population on here, but it's been really nice to work for.

We obviously have job security, and I've been very impressed with the management chain above me. At least on my team, they all come from eng for a few levels until you start hitting VP roles. The fact that they were at least fairly recently technical helps with understanding some of the traditional pain points I've run into in the past in dealing with management.

Everything is built in house, which does have some drawbacks but it's nice that we can interface directly with the people who are working on all of our tools. And everything has an API so there is a great amount of inter-tool integration. Developers get raises, on my team Eng has a big say in what the product is going to be, idk it seems like it checks all of the boxes you're asking about.

Also it's kind of fun to see the company I work for get mercilessly memed all the time.

xyzelement 4 years ago |

One thing quick - this is incredibly subjective. I've worked in some amazing companies but there were always people on Glassdoor or Blind who found something to complain about.

People are fundamentally different. Someone may really enjoy structure and being told exactly what they have to do. Others want ambiguity and open-ended challenges. Some want stability, some want opportunity. So when you hear someone complain about a company (or praise it, I guess) it's important to ask yourself whether this person's values and interests are similar to yours.

Also keep in mind that people who are crushing it are much less likely to spend time talking about this stuff, while people who are not doing well/miserable have more incentive to vent. So often times it's not just subjective to the person but you're more likely to hear complaining than praise all other things being equal.

nwallin 4 years ago |

I work for Esri and it's great. (we do GIS -- geospatial information systems. Our customers include all 50 (US) state governments, like half the Fortune 500s, most national governments...) Virtually everyone has an office, no open office nonsense. There's no pressure to be a 10x developer or whatever, you just do your job. Nobody gets let go for being a mediocre developer. Everyone's hourly, so if you want to work 40 hours a week and go home, that's fine, or if you want to work 60 hours a week and get 50% more money that's fine too. It is, for the most part, a very chill, relaxed work environment.

The owner is a good person. Big into environmental activism. The big company conference is mostly about all environmental conservation (also we added new features to our product). It's weird to work for a big company and get an e-mail from Jane Goodall at Christmas thanking us for the work we do.

The money isn't great though, that's the biggest downside. But personally the money isn't that important to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esri

https://www.esri.com/jobs

bogomipz 4 years ago | |

I'm definitely familiar with Esri, they've been around a long time. Full time people are paid hourly though? Do people negotiate their own hourly rate or is it set?

ryantgtg 4 years ago | |

I wish Redlands was a little closer to LA! Seems like a cool place to work.

I couldn’t believe when the owner bought/preserved Bixby Ranch (on behalf of the nature conservancy). I was a daily ESRI user for years, but my heart leans toward QGIS — yet ESRI will always be in my good graces after that Bixby move.

nojs 4 years ago | |

How long have you worked there, and have you had any experience with the international offices? I’ve heard a few bad stories and was surprised to see something so positive here.

nwallin 4 years ago | | |

Coming up on four years. I know next to nothing about any of the international offices. I work on the main campus in Southern California, so that's basically all I know. I'm familiar with some of the smaller remote offices; some of them don't do the "everyone gets an office" thing.

gaws 4 years ago | |

> The money isn't great though, that's the biggest downside.

How bad are we talking?

micromacrofoot 4 years ago |

In my experience small companies tend to be the best to work for, but this varies wildly.

Large companies are more reliably mediocre across the board, but bad small companies can be outright abusive (usually you can detect these with a few questions in an interview... for example, ask how often employees work outside of regular hours).

PaulStatezny 4 years ago | |

This is accurate in my experience.

Actually, I'd say you're lucky if you find a small company that isn't at least mildly dysfunctional.

munk-a 4 years ago | | |

The silver lining with those dysfunctional ones, though, is that if you can clearly identify the issue your voice can probably carry enough weight (even as a new hire) to spur them to re-evaluate their process.

bogomipz 4 years ago | | |

Agreed. I'd be curious what people count as "small" these days though. Less than 100? Less than 50?

na85 4 years ago | |

As soon as I hear "work hard play hard" I know it's a company that expects long hours for mediocre pay, and then the boss likes to go to the strip club on the weekend.

edu115 4 years ago | | |

"Word hard play hard" is one of our mottos. The office is empty by 5PM. I guess we're doing it wrong?

sys_64738 4 years ago | |

I don't like working for small companies as it can be seat of your pants stuff very often. A lot of them don't understand the concept of what a fire fight is and how to avoid if one occurs. You also don't have as much flexibility if you're on vacation and your role isn't well seconded. Stability is another issue unless it's flush with cash. It can be a crapshoot but obviously it depends. Anyway, my experience is this.

crossroadsguy 4 years ago |

I’d rather just pick one that pays the most while letting me keep sane work hours of 8-9 hours per weekday and doesn’t have 24hr on-call schedule for one person during that person’s on-call rotation.

Quit Uber in 3 months - simply the most pathetic work-life balance I’ve experienced. What a toxic place! What made me sad that I had taken Uber BLR over Fb London.

Worked at an Indian startup for few years - it was balanced. Nothing great, nothing shitty.

Working at a USA startup currently who flat out lied about timing and timezone requirements which I was specific about - so after some time I sent a polite but firm fuck you email one day after mass rejecting all the odd hour meetings from my calendar and setting my google calendar to reject anything after 6pm automatically everyday. They have stopped bothering me but I’m the exception there. It’s a very uncomfortable silence. So leaving soon.

Samsung was really nice. I appreciate the place in hindsight now. Disliked back then. What a blessing it was that let alone work I couldn’t even access email from out of office. And 9-5 was the norm even for managers and higher management.

Yeah, I’m done with the rhetoric of challenge, excitement, ownership, and shit like that that are just buzzwords used as fronts for exploitation. Will take work-life balance over and above anything today.

icco 4 years ago | |

Haven't worked at these places, but heavy +1 to "take work-life balance over and above anything". Currently, I've realized I'm willing to take about a $50k pay cut for better work life balance, and I can only put up with bad balance for about two weeks. When I was younger, I'd put up with all kinds of shit, but now it's never worth it.

gaws 4 years ago | |

> What made me sad that I had taken Uber BLR over Fb London.

You absolutely fucked up there. I hope you can recover.

domh 4 years ago |

I work at a small API doc company called ReadMe, we're ~40 people currently and I've been here since we were 5 people. It's been incredible to see the company grow over the years. We hire excellent people who tend to stick around. We treat people with respect and give them the tools to succeed.

We interview a little differently than most other startups (https://blog.readme.com/designing-a-candidate-focused-interv... ); we've always had very flexible working arrangements (even pre-Covid) and we have a modern codebase (Node.js + React) with high test coverage.

I lead the engineering team now (but still write and review code regularly). We're hiring for a bunch of different roles across the stack (and a management position): https://readme.com/careers. My (personal) email is in my profile if you wanna have a chat!

Kaze404 4 years ago | |

That blog post was a fun read. I identify with many of the things said there, and it's always interesting when a company can make interviewing sound like a good time. I'll definitely apply soon

Edit: also, pardon my French but the owl is fucking adorable

chrisa 4 years ago |

The tricky thing about this question is that a great company for one person could be a terrible company for another, and vice versa.

Based on your description, it sounds like you're looking for a smaller company where the CEO is technical, and understands what the developers are doing.

This is probably an under talked-about part of the interview process: that you should be interviewing the company as much as the company is interviewing you.

No easy answers here I think...

kradeelav 4 years ago | |

This is the right answer. The size of the company also often has a lot to do with different mindsets and what fits for some people. Some people like the relative stability of a large corporation (you're more of a "number" but you are more likely to be able take a paycheck and clock out mindlessly), the pace and learning curve of an agency/startup (higher risk/reward threshold, wildly wonky work-life balance), or even consulting as a different career path for more independent types.

karmakaze 4 years ago |

I ended up at Shopify by way of a small startup I was at being acquired. I didn't know much about the company at the time thinking it was basically an ecommerce website builder. I don't think I would have chosen it on my own. I usually go for tech-heavy startups with significant technical challenges whether it's building up the product or scaling it up and the tech plays a large part of my interests. I ended up working at a Ruby/Rails shop once before and I didn't like it at first and got used to it while I was there. The RoR at Shopify is much more structured the way I would expect a good team of engineers would build something rather than a one-off solo dev. There's also a fair amount of in-house tech so it's Shopify-flavored-RoR. This is fine, but all pretty subjective.

The parts that I think most would find positive is that the company is very transparent internally with high alignment from executive through development. Management is technically aware for companies of any size and especially for a large one. Most decisions are easy to understand and rarely (if ever, can't remember one) has caused me internal conflict of interests. Regardless of the tech used, I haven't gotten bored or needing a challenge for very long. Each new project presents new challenges, that's left for the team to research, prototype, and build. I spend very little time in meetings, and usually only those I want to addend (e.g. team standups, tech talks, show n tells).

Subjective downsides: the company is remote (not '-first' or 'for now', but always for everyone) though team IRL events are +1. The main tech is RoR, MySQL, Go, Redis, Kafka, Elasticsearch. Some groups (e.g. data) use other languages/tools. Of course there's also lots of front-end web/mobile dev that has the challenge of building an extensible platform. Spending time on related opensource work is good. I made some contribs to Sorbet type checker.

Long reply, in short I usually leave a startup after 1.5 - 2 years because it doesn't have anything more for me. I'm coming up on 3 years now.

andychase 4 years ago |

I have have enjoyed working at the EPA (US Government) as an IT Specialist.

The good parts are working with people passionate about their jobs, on things that truly matter. Work life balance and management trust is very high.

The bad parts are there as well: outdated technology, lots of committees, long processes to do certain things. Pay is less then I could get in industry.

Mixed bag: Not a "fast to fire" environment. Ethics/values are very high but that doesn't automatically mean good management. You need to meet and work with a lot of people.. but people are very open to collaborating.

I have heard that the government in a way is supposed to be the "model employer"; kind of being an example to others in terms of diversity/inclusion, time off policies, benefits, etc. And I think is that sort of true at least at this agency.

https://usajobs.gov

scrapcode 4 years ago | |

I have many of the same experiences within an agency of the USDA. It's certainly not fast paced, and you really have to have some experience to what different "IT Specialist" positions do at this branch vs. this other branch, etc... but I really do enjoy my current position as an IT Specialist / Systems Analyst and it has a very modern feel versus my previous gig with a different govt component. One of the unsung benefits to government work is the ability to network and get experience with entirely different 'fields,' so to speak, and potentially pivot (e.g. Development to Networking or Cybersecurity) without necessarily undertaking a new degree program etc.

nickd2001 4 years ago | |

Sounds perfect :) People are always asking on HN, "how do I do a tech job that helps people rather than doing evil stuff". What better example than this. And comes with other perks like work-life balance too.

klyrs 4 years ago |

If I knew, I'd work there already...

Slightly more serious, it's often more about your team than the company overall. If your manager is terrible, life is hell. If your manager's manager is terrible, it's going to be pretty uncomfortable. If the executives are terrible, you might do okay, but keep your resume up to date and shop around just in case they wreck it.

advice_thrwawy9 4 years ago |

I want to preface this by saying I would strongly heed the advice of version_five. All of the most toxic work places I've been at had cheerleaders that would tell you it was amazing.

I have struggled with this issue for years and my approach was to build some heuristics based on where I've been happiest. I fundamentally believe the job landscape now for developers is just systemically worse than it was a decade ago, but these are things I've learned:

- Are you treated with respect throughout the interview. All the companies I've been happiest at had interviews that were basically extended conversations (even if they had coding challenges). I always felt comfortable and respected, different answers than expected where treated with curiosity rather than skepticism. Above all else you need to honestly ask "are these people I want to work with everyday"?

- B2B targeting larger customers tends to be much better than direct to consumer. Every "customer focused" team I've worked with is ultimately driven by a single moronic KPI, and ends up spending all of their energy trying to cheat users while convincing themselves that this is really good work. Large B2B contracts last for years and have a lot of revenue associated with them so there more room for thoughtful product development.

- How important is engineering as you climb the ladder? Is technical leadership (especially above you) really technical? Are they the kind of people that still like hacking on projects, solving technical problems? At my happiest companies technical competence continues up the ladder as far as it can. Your direct manager should be someone that hacking on an unsolved problem with would be fun.

- How financially healthy is the company? This doesn't mean "do they have a lot of funding", in my experience funding without fundamentals leads to weird behavior product wise as teams rush to please investors and come up with ways to survive. If investors and leadership and genuinely happy with the company there is a lot less pressure to do strange product things.

- I used to think smaller companies were my favorite, but have found that a good small team in a large company can be just as good if not better.

After several runs at some of the worst companies in my career I also felt it was impossible to find anything that was enjoyable. I'm currently at a place (that I won't name) where I finally enjoy going to work again, and feel no interest in dusting off my resume anytime soon. This above rules helped a lot with that.

davidw 4 years ago |

What I'd love to know is how to find the smaller more "hacker" oriented shops. I've worked at a few over the years... the kinds of places where everyone in engineering uses Linux desktops because that's the best choice for the work at hand and everyone's comfortable with it. Where the product is good, makes money, but is maybe kind of niche so the company isn't adding 10 people a week.

JohnBooty 4 years ago | |

I would take literally half the going market rate to work someplace like that.

But I think they're near-impossible to pick out, unless you know folks who work there.

What I mean is: even if they publicly advertise open job roles in all the usual places, it's very tricky to actually know they're "that" kind of shop, unless you know somebody on the inside. Even if you are a very proactive candidate during your interviews.

Just IMO/IME.

the_only_law 4 years ago | |

Everytime I see something like this I’m in no position to apply to it, and by the time I am there are no positions.

foogazi 4 years ago | |

> I've worked at a few over the years...

Have you reached out to your network ? Those that worked at those same places with you

nomendos 4 years ago |

From my experience: - NVIDIA seems to have best balance of culture of competency, work satisfaction vs how well is run, although it is getting more bureaucratic as it grows - Google used to be good in many aspects but now things are deteriorating - Facebook is mixed bag, where Oculus part is more of a wild west and main FB is still ok better than Google - Amazon other than "hire to fire" (loading your RSUs towards the end and then raising the bar to force you out before main RSU chunk gets vested) is a mixed bag - Intel is with a royally broken culture, rampant nepotism and crooked HR (just try to google HR flagging employees "THIEVE" just so they do not get re-hired regardless of their performance and also read in the Oregonian news about age discrimination where they mopped large number of actual best engineers - no wonder they lost the edge and are sinking further, not sure if the current CEO who is the best thing that happened to them can save them anymore. My bet if he does not do HR and culture cleanup, he won't be able to do much. The only hope for Intel is geo-political move of the fab manufacturing to the US but even that will have mixed effect.) - Apple is mixed bag, with some teams better and some worse and all suffering from culture of secrecy All in all in each company you can find a good team with a good manager/director/VP as well as you can find bad ones. All pay competitively, where Intel is at the bottom followed by NVIDIA although case by case for higher grades both can compete if needed.

oso2k 4 years ago |

Do your research. There’s tons of “Best places to work” lists out there. Glassdoor and LinkedIn. Probe your network of friends, acquaintances, friends of friends.

I work for Red Hat in Presales. Formerly of Red Hat Consulting for 4.5 years. I’ve been here over 5 years now. Love the place. I’ve only ever worked on our Kubernetes distribution, OpenShift and related products. Great mission. Great work to do. Great people to work with. Good Managers. We’re always hiring.

I also worked at NASA/JPL at the start of my career. Worked on the Mars Rovers, satellite network simulations and then enterprise software. Also great work to do. Great mission. Great people to work with. Good management. Pay was always behind industry. But hard to complain when closing down a project can sometimes mean creating an archive for submission to the National Archives.

futhey 4 years ago | |

Most "Best places to work" lists by city or in print publications are "pay to win".

Exorust 4 years ago |

I loved working at Microsoft. From a management that actually cares and understands dev struggles to great code review practices that don't waste dev time with bs.

Plenty of opportunities to learn, switch teams if needed. I've seen people shift from team to team just because they wanted to add their expertise to another product.

I'll admit, if you're a startup kinda guy you might find things a bit slower than you're used to. Focus is kept on extreme quality.

I hate the fact that Microsoft gets a bad rep coz of the older practices from Gates and Balmer's time. As a company it's really changed and they've embraced open-source finally.

fartcannon 4 years ago | |

Not only embraced, they've actually started the extend phase! A bit of extinguish, too, but only in a few situations (.net projects).

jimmyed 4 years ago | |

Can you be more specific? Microsoft is big, I am guessing you don't mean Microsoft Lahore?

xtracto 4 years ago |

> Project managers don't know anything about technology

In my 10+ years of experience, that's the rule rather than an exception. It is very rare to find a Project/Product manager who actually has decent technical knowledge. I think I've found one or two in my whole career (one is now product VP, the other moved to Switzerland).

a-saleh 4 years ago |

Red Hat.

Worked there as an intern during college, continued for few more years and returned there after a brief stint at a startup.

Work/life balance is great, most code public has so many advantages and colleagues are friendly and decent humans.

Some teams might be worse than what I experienced, but even if I was growing mildly frustrated (i.e. pressure from product people to push product out of hte gate before it was ready and I was one of hte damned QA people), the robust internal transfer system meant, I could just move to a team where I felt my contribution was more valued even from non-programmers ;)

bogomipz 4 years ago | |

I'd be curious if the IBM acquisition has had any effect on that culture? Is that pressure from product people a result post-IBM?

a-saleh 4 years ago | | |

No, product/dev disconect was there quite often for years. Red Hat has kinda been living off the unix-to-linux migration that happened in early 2000s, and because I think we didn't wan to become the kind of company that just maintains legacy kernel for banking mainframes, we spent most of the 2010s comming up with ideas to see what gains traction. And sometimes these ideas were ... oversold ... to our potential customers?

Despite how nice I find the culture at Red Hat, it definitely isn't lacking in some of the corporate disconnects that sometimes happen. Like, I think we are working on it and it differs from team to team, but it still is there :)

Other than that, I don't see much change in the culture in general.

dustintrex 4 years ago | |

How is assimilation into IBM going?

a-saleh 4 years ago | | |

Well, there was lot of jokes at the start, people comming in to work in blue ties for day or two.

In reality, nothing changed, for better or worse, we did kinda speculate that this was kind of an expensive acquihire of one James M. Whitehurst and if the have to buy this profitable company alongside with him, might as well :D

Another speculation is, that we are one of the more profitable parts of IBM, so the rest of the company doesn't want to f- with that, but if we stop being the golden-goose our management was selling us as, more interference might comme our way.

mgas 4 years ago |

I am a Drupal developer for a government contractor. Management absolutely knows what the product is, and our PM knows the sites we build and maintain inside and out (both from a Technical and a UX/Design perspective). The pace is probably slower than a lot of devs are used to, and there are a lot of moving parts, but that is what it's like working around government hierarchy. I for one like the well-defined structure.

It absolutely does not suck. The people involved are not hotshot CS grads moving from FAANG to FAANG trying to get salary boosts every 6 months. They've been doing this kind of work their whole lives, and just want stability.

Also, that team in Transylvania are an excellent bunch of developers who've probably been doing CS since they were in middle school, so don't knock them for being foreign. Knock your company for offshoring their labor. Those Transylvanians are trying to make something of themselves and improve the standard of living in Romania. Case in point, I was one of them.

The main takeaway is that who doesn't suck to work for depends on what you want. You want money? The people giving a lot of money probably only care about you inasmuch as you produce something worthy of your salary. Beyond that (and whatever 'perks' they pretend to offer), they don't give a rat's ass about you. You want to feel like you're part of something? Get involved with a small-ish team in a mid-size company with long-term clients. Your life will be part of a team, the company won't have too much middle management, and long term clients mean long term goals.

ryapric 4 years ago |

I work for a consulting company called Slalom and for 3.5 years now I don't know if I've been happier working. It's a (private) big global place, but we have a "local market model" which effectually means you feel like you're working for a much smaller company (which is your home office). I still get to do plenty of development work during projects, but I also get to work in people leadership, practice leadership, give conference talks, sell if I want to (note: I don't lol), and the best part from a developer's standpoint is that when a project is over, you just... Leave. After almost 5 years of being responsible for an ever-growing list of software I had to maintain alone at a startup, it's a really liberating feeling for my ADHD self. And yes, we're hiring worldwide!

buro9 4 years ago |

Grafana is incredible. I was pleased with the conscious and clear hiring, the apparent calm and emotional safety exuded by those who interviewed. And then when I joined by the integrity and leadership, which has a strong vision and great execution, coupled with real empathy for engineers and our customers. I'm loving it and it stands as a very stark contrast to my previous roles, and I hear similar from my colleagues at all levels too. Lots of autonomy, space to do a good job, a learning and personal growth culture. The way above average number of smart people to learn from. It's always been remote so they get this right.

What is more individual is that the rapid growth creates a lot of change, and that isn't for everyone so do bear in mind that YMMV depending on who you are but it really is a great place to work.

toyg 4 years ago | |

> What is more individual is that the rapid growth creates a lot of change, and that isn't for everyone

Tell me about it. The company I work for is literally a rocket in its sector, but that means I've had three different managers in a year. Every time I think I've mastered the stuff enough to relax a tiny bit, it all gets thrown out of the window. Definitely keeps me on my toes, but I'm not sure I'm growing as much as keeping my head above water.

Hermitian909 4 years ago |

This is highly dependent on who you are as a person, but I'd honestly say most of the big tech firms excepting a few which you can suss out based on reputation.

IMO people overestimate how much you can know about whether a team will be good over the span of 2+ years. I've had several friends land at a small company with what seemed like a great team and then the great manager was replaced by a bad one, the job started sucking, and everyone had to jump ship and go on a new job search. If it happens soon enough after you join you may not be able to leave for over a year for appearance's sake.

At big companies, you can still get bad teams but many places, such as Stripe, make it super easy to switch teams for a better fit.

sokoloff 4 years ago | |

I think employees wildly overestimate the negative resume impact of leaving any individual role "too soon". Your life is short and your career is shorter. Don't stay at a place that sucks.

If you show up with one short stint, I might ask about it, but I'll totally understand a "it wasn't what I was expecting answer". If you have two of those with at least one 2-3 year stint (ideally including a promotion), that's also fine.

The danger only comes when you have 5+ stints of 6-15 months in a row. That reads like you might have a performance/potential problem.

JohnBooty 4 years ago | |

    many places, such as Stripe, make it super easy to 
    switch teams for a better fit.

Another commenter mentioned that this is a strength of FB, and I find it amazing. I've not experienced that in my time in the industry though I've never worked for any "famous" technically-oriented orgs.

Don't misunderstand: I have a rock-solid belief in the importance of team fit. Nobody can do good work unless they're a good engineer and have found a good team fit.

I'm just amazed that any orgs actually pull this off, rather than simply considering somebody a bad hire. That's what I've always seen. Unless it was an engineer that had already succeeded at a given company for a number of years, and was faring poorly with a new team.

Hermitian909 4 years ago | | |

It happens! I've fortunately never needed to do it but I know easily 50 engineers who've made a successful team jump within 3-8 months of the initial hire.

jp0d 4 years ago |

I've been working for Xero since three years. It's a great place to work. Free barista coffee, fruits and social gathering every Friday. Everyone is very helpful and nice. Waiting to move into a brand new office here in Melbourne, AU. It's great to work for a company that cares about ethics and governance. We've to jump through several hoops before we can do anything with customer data. I have a lot of freedom in terms what tools to choose for my work. I've never had such experience working for big IT consulting companies prior to Xero.

Disclaimer: I'm a current employee here. I'm a data analyst! I haven't been asked or paid to write this. haha.

fphhotchips 4 years ago | |

I don't work for Xero but I have worked with some of the data team and can honestly say that they've hired some of my favourite people in Melbourne to work there, and no one I don't like. High quality team that I hope I overlap with some day.

jp0d 4 years ago | | |

Thank you. Glad that you've enjoyed working with us. I can confirm that everyone I meet here have been wonderful human beings! I can safely say that it's a big part of the hiring process, without giving up too much details. :)

aviditas 4 years ago |

I work for an education focused nonprofit (medium sized 1000~) and while I still get frustrated at times, it's the 'this can be even better' VS the 'this is hell on earth' that I've dealt with at big corporations. Everyone is so dang nice which coupled with a savvy ceo and flexible work life has been ridiculously soothing to my previously burnt-out self. The unpleasant people that exist at all businesses are rare and are definite noted outliers. Even if people get upset or frustrated, it's always clear that it's about the situation or problem rather than lashing out at others. It is sweet relief to work with people that care about what they do and having the mission being a genuinely good thing. There is a practical and people first culture exemplified by remote only if you choose, transparent pay ranges, great benefits, and a sense of we can be better than we were in most aspects of the biz. We are in dire need of architect roles and have a variety of other dev, tech, and biz reqs posted. Like any org, there is room for improvement but those improvements don't feel insurmountable. :)

somewhat_drunk 4 years ago |

GM. No really. Hear me out.

Great work/life balance, benefits, and management structure.

They're transitioning to remote work if your job allows it. A large percentage of the company is already work from home. I just got permission to go lower 48 US remote a few days ago.

And they're doing a lot of really cool shit. Ultium. Cruise. Brightdrop. Almost no matter what your specialty, GM has it.

I'm challenged every day. My coworkers are smart and driven. If you don't like what you're doing, you can move. A year ago I was a hands-on mechanical engineer with little coding experience who wanted to transfer to software. Now I'm a fully remote controls engineer.

Mary Barra is a hell of a CEO. She's forward-thinking and isn't afraid to push the company in the direction she thinks it should go in, and so far, she's been right on the money. She champions diversity, and it's not just for show. Barra has transformed GM from a stodgy good-old-boys garbage-producing shitshow into an innovation powerhouse, the world hasn't recognized it yet.

jimmieego 4 years ago |

My friend built TrueUp (https://www.trueup.io/rankings). It has curated listings and rankings of companies related to diversity, ethical issues, employee happiness, and so on. This may be a useful tool when researching what companies to work for.

x3n0ph3n3 4 years ago |

VMware has a lot of different teams working on very different and interesting problems. It's not listed with the FAANG companies, but it pays well and you won't feel like you're making the world worse off than it is.

You'll probably see some complaints about some teams in VMware, but it's been mostly a great place to work.

the_only_law 4 years ago | |

I thought about applying to some positions with them a couple months back, but it was hard to get a good idea if I was gonna miserable or not.

Also the team I was looking at worked on a type of product that while technically intriguing to me, makes me want to rip my hair out as a user lol.

jurassic 4 years ago | |

VMware seems like a place where people work either less than 2 years or 10+ years. If you can identify a niche for yourself it can be quite comfortable.

clpm4j 4 years ago | |

I've been envious of the VMware campus in Palo Alto - seems like an ideal environment if WFH isn't an option.

DLion 4 years ago | |

Agree, VMware it's a very nice place where to work.

xtracto 4 years ago |

> There's an offshore team in Traansylvania busy making it a legacy codebase

As someone working for a US company in Mexico, I take offense at that :(.

wbh1 4 years ago |

I've really enjoyed working for Linode. We're a smaller company (~250 people total), but work on a global scale. I've found the work to be challenging but rewarding, leadership to be approachable and willing to listen, and the benefits to be great. Coming from a large higher education environment (where the "Information Services" department was 600+ people) it's remarkable how much better the culture is here.

the_only_law 4 years ago | |

What’s their interview process like? I saw a really interesting role with them a couple months back. They seemed to pay a little less than similar companies, but a lot of the work looked cool. I’ve also had people tell me they had negative experiences interviewing with them.

loxias 4 years ago | |

Loyal customer for more than 13 years now! You've got a great product at a great price! I considered applying for a job once, a while ago... Have you always been in Philly? I thought I dismissed applying because of location, but I love Philly...

wly_cdgr 4 years ago | |

Your docs are a treasure!

zekenie 4 years ago |

Honestly, I don't think it's possible to create a list like that. Certainly some companies are holistically better than others, but so so so much of it depends on an individual's manager, team, likes, dislikes and other externalities. Companies have better and worse moments, better and worse leadership, but if a company is a great fit for you today, it could be a bad fit in a couple of years.

I think a better place to focus than looking for non-shitty companies would be focusing on finding coworkers who are good at navigating the shit in a way you respect. When the going gets rough, who are the people you want to be around? What are the behaviors you want them to show you? How can you determine that in an interview?

aoeusnth1 4 years ago |

I have had amazing managers and coworkers at Google. People that cared for me as a person, helped me grow technically and supported me career.

Obviously at a huge company there will be a lot of variance, but on my teams I have had a lot of autonomy to choose what to work on and how to make it happen. That was a big reason why I enjoyed it so much there.

icco 4 years ago |

I enjoyed working at Google, but it was incredibly team dependent. Spent two stints there (4y and 2y), on three separate teams. First team was frustrating, second two teams were wonderful.

I feel like a lot of interviewing is figuring out if the company is good to work for. The one time I jumped right into a job, I had the above experiences like you did (small startup). Since then, I try to spend an hour with most of the people that would be in my decision tree. Quickly discover if they a) know where the product should go b) I get along with them culturally c) they are good at their jobs.

lkrych 4 years ago |

Cisco.

Great teamwork and culture, tons of smart and friendly people, interesting technical problems (I think computer networking is interesting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), opportunities for growth, and good work-life balance.

One thing to note is that much of this might be because I got lucky and joined the team that was part of the OpenDNS acquisition.

twalla 4 years ago | |

Just be prepared for your RSUs to basically remain stagnant for your entire tenure because the hardware business is a boat anchor for the stock price.

redis_mlc 4 years ago | | |

Correct. Cisco stock growth is not only limited by the hw business since 2000, but Huawei ate their lunch on growth, which is the kiss of death for a tech company. See Nortel.

(Zoom was started with 40 Webex (Cisco) engineers. lol.)

Also Cisco salaries are really low for SV, like 30% less - totally non-FAANG. I've pointed that out to Cisco recruiters, and they almost cried on the phone begging me to go to the next interview step anyway.

penjelly 4 years ago |

This requires information about you that others dont have. What is "sucky" to you apart from your very short list? Some people thrive on hard work, others love the lax lifestyle of a cushy job. Best advice? Ask your former coworkers, you shared mutual experiences and likely have opinions to bounce off eachother. If you find they shared similar values, find out where they are now and how that experience is going. This also allows for conversations at length as opposed to a comment which may or may not be nuanced enough to be helpful.

tway35 4 years ago |

Koch Industries

Truly unique culture (go read Good Profit). Shockingly flexible organization, willing to do what’s best in the long run, and is investing tens of billions dollars in technology across numerous industries (Infor and Molex at one end of the spectrum and Flint Hills resources and Georgia Pacific at the other).

https://jobs.kochcareers.com/search/information-systems-and-...

rsj_hn 4 years ago | |

They make the softest toilet paper. There was one of those ersatz progressive boycotts of Koch Industries where they listed all the Koch owned brands and which brands were politically acceptable alternatives, and out of curiosity I bought some of the alternatives in my own ideological litmus test, if you will.

I have to say the progressive toilet paper (Cottonelle) was inferior to the conservative toilet paper (State Street owned Charmin and Koch owned Angel Soft & Quilted Northern). Not sure why that's the case - you'd think this would be a commodity - but that's how it is.

Just goes to show that even if your heart is progressive, your bum is reactionary.

runnerup 4 years ago | |

I've had terrible experiences with Flint Hills (screaming turnaround managers) and my friends have only horror stories of Georgia-Pacific.

Actually, I've never heard anything good about any paper plant anywhere.

phillipcarter 4 years ago |

I started out at Microsoft out of college and spent 6 years there.

Yes, it was a pay cut compared to some job-hopping a few peers did. But the environment was great, my coworkers were wonderful, and I got to develop deep expertise to the point where I'm legitimately a world expert in a specialized domain now.

Like any big company, results vary by division/org/team, but if you land in a good place, you'll have the pleasure of working with great people who care about your growth and well-being. Not a bad deal.

ksml 4 years ago |

I agree with other comments saying that this is going to depend on what you're looking for and on your personal situation -- there is no job that is right for everyone.

That being said, I recently joined Coda as an SRE, and I have really enjoyed it so far. Company size is in my personal sweet spot: the team is small enough that it still has the startup aspects of having visibility into everything happening in the company and being able to work on anything you feel is important, but it's big enough that things are relatively stable, there are lots of resources, there aren't fires all the time. The team is incredible: everyone I have worked with is extremely capable but also extremely nice and humble. Many people joined from highly unconventional backgrounds but Coda hired them for their passion for their roles. I have also felt that the company prioritizes employees in ways both big and small, from little things (e.g. every interview started with checking in to make sure the time was still okay, nice gesture with the chaos of online/remote interviewing) to big things like comp/equity (instead of stock options, you have the option to receive the equity as a grant, or as a loan if you don't have capital to pay the taxes on a grant, and you have the option to sell some stock in every fundraising round even though we aren't public). Several of the founders had kids while starting the company, so there was a strong culture of work/life balance from the beginning. We have our share of tech debt, but so far I have thought the codebase and tooling have been really high quality too.

Email in my bio if you want to chat.

lasciastare 4 years ago |

LEGO A/S Denmark - Denmark location

Positives: + Great product that kids of all ages (1-99) all around the world like and will want to talk to you when you say you work for LEGO + Healthy work life balance + Company really cares about it's employees (not just on paper) + Family owned + Huge emphasis on doing this in legal, ethical ways + Profit gets reinvested in renewable energy and similar projects and in significant percentage given to good causes + Plenty of work for IT people in different parts of organization (take your pick...) + Relocation is handled/helped by the company + Most of the areas are quite international

Negatives: - If you do not get hired for CPH office, your workplace will be Billund on Jutland which is boooooooring (good if you are a parent) - Weather sucks in Denmark, so if you come from somewhere more south you will complain - Like in any big company, promotions, implementation of ideas ect can be based both on rational reasons like contribution, ROI and office politics (depends on departments) - Some areas might be more amateurish than you are used to in IT solution oriented companies (SAAS and similar)...but you can view it as places for improvement

Disclosure: I have worked and am working at LEGO as an IT-ish engineer for 5+ years.

Feel free to ask questions.

Cazafr 4 years ago | |

I've been looking into working there for quite some time. Is there a possibility of working remotely if you're on an IT team ?

lasciastare 4 years ago | | |

From what I know, you can't. I'm guessing you are asking if you can reside in another country. They do have liberal work from home policy but you will be hired in Denmark and that means you have to be residing in Denmark and have valid Danish Yellow (social security) card.

zwieback 4 years ago |

This may be hard to believe for the HN crowd but hp has been great for me (Corvallis, OR). Sure, we're not the company Bill & Dave started but current leadership has steered the boat out of the mess created by 10+ years of rocky times.

the_only_law 4 years ago | |

I’ve seen some interesting looking roles with them and some of their child companies, I’m just weary of large legacy enterprises. My last job I sat around fora year while the project was delayed due to bureaucracy.

bkberry352 4 years ago | |

Surprised to see another Corvallis resident here (though I don't work for HP)

maxshm 4 years ago |

IMHO: 1. Company should be small. I worked in a few small companies. One have grown to headcount above 200 and became a swamp full of unmotivated people. 2. There should be great team members. 3. Founders should be software people or engineers.

asdfman123 4 years ago | |

Midsize companies are great, but they're not for slackers because people there actually expect you to work. However, if you do actually work, they're good for that.

stickyricky 4 years ago |

I work for a small software consultancy that was acquired by one of its clients. I'm the only engineer. No meetings, no micro-managing, wide variety of tasks, interesting technical challenges, sometimes no work. Bliss.

Uptrenda 4 years ago |

I work for a small financial company called Cypher.trade (building out a futures platform on Solana) and I really like working there. Everyone in the team is amazingly skilled and management is hands-off but detailed enough for you to know exactly what to do.

I find the company refreshing because:

- They allow remote workers in any time zone

- Expectations for engineers are reasonable

- The requirements for the product are well defined

- Team members are competent

- Communication is decent

This honestly avoids many of the problems I've had to deal with early on in my career. It has been a good place to work for so far. If you have experience with trading systems, solana, 'smart contracts', cryptography, or web3 maybe shoot an email to offpisteprotocol@protonmail.com or DM the twitter account https://twitter.com/cypher_protocol.

I think this company would be a good place to work for just about anyone. You will need to be curious and self-motivated to get a job there. Consider applying if you're a reasonably skilled technical person.

softwaredoug 4 years ago |

I have been at Shopify 1.25 years and really enjoyed it. It’s a very engineering centric organization that is both ambitious and kind. While at the same time wanting to push the boundaries of commerce (and attracting people that want to push those boundaries) they also work to reinforce constantly work life balance, stepping away from work, and so on.

dmitrygr 4 years ago |

I've been having a great time at Apple. I joined a bit over two years ago (coming from a 7.5-year-long stint at google). The people are great, the work is very interesting. Highly recommended.

Google used to be a non-sucky place to work, but from what I hear from friends still there, it's not at all like it was in 2012

omoikane 4 years ago | |

Google is still a nice place to work overall, but as with most large companies there is probably some variance in the working experience depending on where you are and when you got there.

orian 4 years ago | |

Eric was great CEO and TGIFs were the thing ;-)

nickd2001 4 years ago |

The right place in the public sector (govt', academia etc), can be awesome. If the place has an important mission, that'll attract intelligent idealistic people, who make very nice colleagues. If you get to work on up to date (or in some cases actually ahead of the game e:g open source that's not yet widely used) tech, while sufficiently relaxed environment that you've time to learn properly and retain those skills, that's really good long-term career value. Of course, headline salary is likely to be lower than private sector. But you might get a final salary pension, other perks, career might last longer if you avoid burnout. Having done both, I give big thumbs up to public sector. Even the not so good parts, if its a beaurocratic hole that can be a great chance to sort it out, quite fulfilling to fix messes...

specproc 4 years ago | |

Yeah, I'm a non-profit boy. Similar sort of setup. I'm never going to get crazy money, but the work's super interesting and I'm treated like a wizard.

Plenty of downsides. You're often project-funded and subject to the various whims of donor-funded project cycles; and without the sharp discipline of the profit motive, lots of organizations end up being a bit of a bloated, navel-gazing mess.

That said, having done this for many orgs for fifteen years or so, I can count the number of colleagues I've actively disliked on the fingers of one hand; have gotten a tonne of exposure to some really interesting places, people and ideas; and have found the sector as a whole incredibly supportive, friendly and fun.

quadrifoliate 4 years ago |

Unfortunately, I don't have a recommendation.

But I have a suggestion for the community – could we make this a monthly thing? A "Who's not sucky to work for" thread on the 3rd of every month might be interesting and help us understand the complex reality of employer versus employee preferences.

oblio 4 years ago |

Hey! Don't diss the Transylvanian team!

qudat 4 years ago |

Aptible:

  - Only ~15 employees
  - Profitable
  - Fully distributed team
  - Great work/life balance
  - CEO is one of the best software engineers I’ve worked with
  - Interesting problems (building a security-focused PaaS)
  - We are hiring

bradly 4 years ago |

I worked at Apple and Intuit and were all great for me to work at, but both also had teams that were not great.

When I interview I make sure the interview is for a specific team with a specific manager and that the interview is with the manager or someone else directly on the team I will be working with. I've had to request and it hasn't been a problem yet.

> Management don't know what they want the product to be. Project managers don't know anything about technology.

Spicy take: These are things you should get used to if you are want to be a great engineer. You'll get varying degrees of this everywhere depending on your own personal views and knowledge.

cprayingmantis 4 years ago |

Come work with me at nCino! We’re a Banking SaaS company based on Salesforce and AWS . Wait don’t stop reading yet! We’re working on a ton of neat products for banks and everyone I’ve ever worked with here is top notch! I can’t think of one person I have worked with that I wouldn’t want to work with again. nCino treats it’s employees very well from your first day here you’re part of the team, generous pay, benefits, and they’re always flexible. In short if you want to work with great people at the top of their game who will help you get to the top of your game, in a great environment email me!

cebert 4 years ago |

I’ve worked at Tyler Technologies for over eleven years and love it. You won’t make high TC you can make at FAANG firms. However, you can build software that helps local government and municipalities. I feel like my work is valuable and helps contribute to a better world. I work on 911 software for dispatch centers and first responders. Tyler also has a large courts, education, and appraisal and tax prescience. We’re also growing into the Federal market. If you want to make government better, it may be worth checking out.

unnouinceput 4 years ago |

Yourself. 13 years, 14 in December, as freelancer, I get to work directly with people who have problems, my software really helps them instead of being an internal tool that will get reinvented in 5 years at big corporations. I choose my own projects, I am constantly learning in different industries, meeting (both virtually and in person) people from all 5 continents and while the pay is great my biggest motivator is that I can spend time with my family and raise my own kids. I do realize I'm one of the lucky few.

reasonabl_human 4 years ago | |

Did you do a stint in big tech companies prior to going freelance? Is it just you or did you form a team of devs?

unnouinceput 4 years ago | | |

Yes, I worked in corporation before, for 10 years. Biggest was Siemens. And it's just me, no other developer, though sometime clients are programmers too.

slothtrop 4 years ago | |

How did you get started in this?

unnouinceput 4 years ago | | |

Did an account on Upwork (was oDesk when I started) and just for giggles and luls I did bunch of their online tests. managed to be in top 1% in those tests and lo&behold I started to get invites to projects. Got clients, saw I can earn more this way and half a year later I was going full freelancer. Never looked back

unstatusthequo 4 years ago |

Yourself? Not to be snarky but whenever there is someone with another interest in play, conflict can arise.

mikeryan 4 years ago | |

I can say this with someone who’s been his “own boss” for 11 years. Clients suck as bad, if not worse then corporate overlords and at least corporate overlords are pretty predictable.

“My job would be great except for the clients and employees*” - Me.

(my employees are awesome people - this is more about dealing with HR Issues that inevitably crop up.)

chad_strategic 4 years ago |

Worst job I have ever had was easily the Marines.

It took me 20 years to get out.

sparrish 4 years ago |

Yourself

Being your own boss is freakin' awesome. I'll never go back.

reasonabl_human 4 years ago | |

Curious to know your journey to viably being your own boss

nunez 4 years ago | |

when was the last time you slept? :p

PragTob 4 years ago |

Remote(.com)

I've only been here for ~6 months but it's been one of the most incredible places to work at for me.

Everyone is kind (kindness is a core value), proactive and helpful. People take real time off in which they are unreachable (even the CEO & CTO), taking more time off is highly and really encouraged.

I get a lot of Ownership (another value) over what I do and how I do it - I do a lot of stuff that's not connected to my team at all, I criticise the way we do things and well... it's highly appreciated and my opinion is valued and we actually change things.

I just had my first performance review with my manager and what he put as the highlight of my last 6 months is a post I made about how people should not work over hours and take vacation.

This culture has utterly fascinated me. I've been at places where they said they had these values but really didn't, so far either remote is tremendous at faking me out or it's really that great. Which to be honest I'm still sometimes skeptical about as it can't be that good ;)

Oh. And yeah on the side I work fully remotely still have a great connection to my colleagues and we work on something important that helps workers and companies that I actually care about.

nine_zeros 4 years ago |

There are very few companies (and sometimes few teams in large companies) who are driven to actually produce something better.

Typically, these companies are startups/midsize pre-ipo companies that are determined to reach somewhere. Until the product(s) are well established, the engineering there is highly regarded - but often loaded with tech debt.

Once the product is well established, it becomes a game of meetings where everyone just looks after their own self.

sys_64738 4 years ago |

Big companies can be good or bad depending on which team you are part of. Also, your relationship with your manager ultimately decides your fate in most cases.

hospadar 4 years ago |

I work for ITHAKA (parent of jstor.org) and I think they are decidedly non-suckey: https://www.ithaka.org/

- Great benefits

- Very transparent leadership

- Nonprofit (501c3) - long-term sustainability of the org & product are major goals which (IMO) makes for much better project/team/personal incentives

- Remote work for any position, but also offices in Ann Arbor, NYC, and Princeton

- Education-oriented mission

mietek 4 years ago | |

Never forget JSTOR together with MIT drove Aaron Swartz to suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

dhosek 4 years ago | |

Do you get free jstor access?

mountainriver 4 years ago |

I’ve worked for a bunch of startups that have been acquired:

VMware: really bad, upper management ruins everything

Oracle: where dreams go to die

Rackspace: hands down the worst company I’ve ever seen

vborovikov 4 years ago |

I'm trying to imagine an ideal day at work for myself and then during the interview process I ask questions to understand how far it's going to be from that ideal day working in this company.

I ask about meetings and their durations, performance reviews, bureaucracy levels, project management software, spyware used by the employer, the number of lines of code, and other potential red flags.

Philip-J-Fry 4 years ago |

Keep in mind that at any large company people's experiences will vary from team to team. I can read reviews about my job where people make it out to be the worst place on earth. Yet I think it's quite cushy and don't really have anything bad to say about it.

There's rarely going to be one company that is great to work for all around unless they're small to medium sized.

jeffyang 4 years ago |

I'm obviously biased, but my company, Rising Team, is a great place to work.

Our product helps managers understand and care about their team members. We envision a world where everyone in the workforce is deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals. We live this vision and of course we eat our own dogfood.

Personally, I believe in the power of transparency and honesty. If something is off, even just a little bit, we should discuss it. If we're not both winning, something is not working and we need to work to fix it.

I'm nowhere near perfect and I've messed up before as a manager and I will continue to mess up. But in the end even my messups work out, sometimes even better actually, because we communicate with each other and we care about each other.

We're currently hiring a senior software engineer and a PM. You can check it out at https://risingteam.com/careers

Feel free to ask me anything, especially if there's something you're skeptical of.

nunez 4 years ago |

i'm enjoying my time at VMware (in the MAPBU org, i.e., the one doing all of the Kubernetes stuff). the benefits are great, compensation is great, everyone is wicked smart, leadership are engineers and/or scientists (mostly), and we're building things that the company is deeply invested in

generally, i've enjoyed my time the most at startups or small consultancies

RickJWagner 4 years ago |

Oooh, oooh! I know!

It will be an employer that's not pushing lame woke initiatives. Those pretty quickly divide the workforce and lead to a witch-hunt environment.

Look for a good, solid workplace that sticks to good business principles while quietly treating a diverse workforce with respect. (In other words, they walk the walk instead of talking the talk.) That'll bring you happiness.

twtrgrunt 4 years ago |

I don't think you can make a judgement about a company. I think its really about the team and manager.

My first team at twitter was horrible, from the team members to managers, toxic and stressful. I was stuck doing after hours work, and oncall was miserable with constant off hours pages and no one had desire to do something about it.It was terrible for my mental health. I couldn't wait to leave. I switched teams and it was like joining a new company, unbelievable. People respected my opinion, no one was an asshole, everyone was polite and friendly. There's constant stupid shit going on with the directors and vps, doing reorgs or w/e trying to justify their existence i guess but none of that effects me. Plenty of of coworkers and friends at work have had similar experience. Some teams are truly hellish nightmares and some are great.

phibz 4 years ago |

I'm really enjoying my first 4 months at Two Sigma as a senior SRE with promises of movement into the management track.

Nearly everyone is extremely highly skilled. It's not like most past jobs where a handful of people are highly talented. Here most people are extremely proficient.

And then there's a culture of healthy boundaries and communication styles.

I thought that being a quant (using computers to selectively buy and sell financial securities) they would work us to death but the typical work week is at or below 40 hours. And starting at the VP level netted me over a month of vacation.

Their hiring process is a bit much and quite slow. They took almost 4 months to hire me. But typical is about a month from initial contact to offer.

Maybe consider Two Sigma. We need smart, professional individuals.

RhysU 4 years ago | |

Welcome! I still enjoy it here after 7 years.

donaminos 4 years ago |

I did work for a dozen of companies during my career, I can definitely say that the last one I joined, Remote, is the best workplace in the world (at least one of the bests). I tried hard to think about something more that I can ask for, but couldn't come up with. I have:

- Freedom to chose the schedules that suits my personal needs

- Unlimited PTO

- Kindness is in our DNA, from CEO to the last junior joiner, and any management layer in between. I've never seen that much kindness in any company before

- Time + yearly budget for learning

- Competitive salary + stock options

- Amazing and very talented coworkers to learn from

- Great business with huge impact in the world

I did think about what could make me leave Remote, I found only two reasons :

- I want to start my own company (Where I'll do my best to replicate the same values and environment)

- They fired me :D

geekraver 4 years ago |

I've worked at startups, Microsoft (Ballmer days), Google, eBay, and back at Microsoft (Satya days). eBay was nice but not great infrastructure. Google had great infrastructure but was like a headless chicken, and after a while having that much autonomy and lack of leadership and vision gets old. Microsoft is slower, more staid, more hierarchical and incremental (and the focus on enterprise customers means that won't change), but has good leadership who show genuine care for the workforce, and knows how to execute, day in and day out. And the scope of what Microsoft does means you should never be bored. I'd recommend eBay and Google as good places to work, but Microsoft is a great place to work.

undoware 4 years ago |

Surprisingly, Microsoft is pretty damn good these days.

tagawa 4 years ago |

I recently left DuckDuckGo (personal reasons) and would recommend it as an ethical but growth-oriented place to work. Lovely bunch of people with aligned values, a clear company strategy, and respect for individual freedom and personal situations.

fredley 4 years ago |

If you're looking for remote work (UK/EU) I can highly recommend my employer, Prolific. A business run with compassion as a fundamental. I've never enjoyed my work more. Drop me a message if you'd like to talk more.

Volrath89 4 years ago |

I think all jobs suck in some way or another. The best approach in my opinion is to not worry too much about it, work just the required 8 daily hours and try to enjoy life outside of work.

If you feel you are not getting good enough raises, just look for another job. The market is hot atm.

If the codebase is that bad and the offshore team is making it worse, see my last paragraph. Honestly I've many times considered quitting because of an awful code base

If you really like/enjoy programming and feel bad because in the job you can't program the way you want then make your own side projects, they don't need to be for profit.

laingc 4 years ago |

When I worked there a few years ago, Xero was a pretty stellar employer. Lots of really lovely people, lots of opportunity to explore different avenues in your career, and active attention paid to employee wellbeing.

bedobi 4 years ago |

Expedia has treated me well and has been great for me and my career, but I think with huge orgs like that, it varies wildly depending on the team, even in the same location.

I like my team because we're:

(actually) diverse

extremely progressive with tech (eg Kotlin + Arrow and sane frameworks instead of 90s style run of the mill Java with Spring) and always open to trying out new things and tech

comp, benefits, work life balance and remote opportunities are excellent

last but not least, everyone is super friendly and encouraging, with zero tolerance for toxic tech-bro attitudes

I'm in Brisbane, Australia =)

pram 4 years ago | |

I have the opposite opinion. The reorg at Expedia was an absolute disaster and entire teams and orgs have essentially gone extinct from attrition. Pretty much after Barry Diller started getting personally involved. It was great until then though.

throwaway984393 4 years ago |

For my skillset, there's tons of jobs in industries like entertainment, finance, insurance, tech B2B, advertising, private sector contracting, chemical manufacturing, gambling, etc. I'm really sick of my labor going towards turning people into consumer zombies, making the rich richer, or otherwise exploiting people or nature.

How do you find a tech job where you know your labor is actually having a positive impact on humanity? It feels like they're not hiring. Maybe the problem is just working in tech.

mac01021 4 years ago | |

What is an example of a company that you see as having a positive impact?

yuppiepuppie 4 years ago |

Primer.io has been quite nice so far. I’m writing this from one of our twice yearly workcations in Tenerife. Our fully remote has gotten together in an Airbnb, basically all expenses paid for to chill work and have fun together.

The product is very interesting and innovative. The teams are well organized and quite self sufficient. And there are huge challenges to overcome in every aspect of the company. Anywhere you look there is something you can do to make it better.

eitland 4 years ago |

In Norway you could do worse than working for Entur (I'm work as a consultant there and they are amazing, they are hiring, but I prefer being a consultant.)

Edit after rereading: since you ask were we work, self promotion seems to be OK with you. I work in Computas. We are employee owned and in 4.5 years I have not had to deal with a single jerk. That feels quite amazing given what I'm used to.

solarmist 4 years ago | |

Do they sponsor visas?

eitland 4 years ago | | |

Sorry, I don't think so. If one is living inside the European Economic region one might just travel to Norway but from outside of Europe it becomes harder I guess.

chaircher 4 years ago |

Live somewhere for a long time and in a close knit community. Eventually you hear through word of mouth long before you even consider applying.

throwawayaussen 4 years ago |

Australia focused, but Canva is the best place I've ever worked. Varied engineering challenges, upper management and product managers respect engineering decisions. Smart coworkers, great perks, the office (optional) is the best. Metrics are hockey sticking so it's exciting being part of something big in a country where that is rare. No brilliant jerks is my favourite.

zarkov99 4 years ago |

Check out Noom. Super nice people, strong ethics and mission and a focus on employee satisfaction. Bonus points: parabolic growth trajectory.

pawelmurias 4 years ago |

Google

asdfman123 4 years ago | |

I'm really enjoying Google too. The only downside to it is the challenges of working for a bigcorp: getting everyone to agree on what you want to do is a lot of work.

But everything else about the company is super nice.

m1117 4 years ago | |

Lol, this post is like 10 years late.

wanderer2323 4 years ago | |

Google is amazing.

kvz 4 years ago |

As a developer: Transloadit. Profitable. No investors looking to twist arms to make short term gains. Founders are in it for the long haul and developers so there’s appreciation and time made available to refactor and write tests. Small team, large footprint. Remote. Open. 80% of resources are spent on open source. Disclosure: founder.

irrational 4 years ago |

I’ve spent 20 years working for a non-tech Fortune 500 company. Frankly I’ve loved my job the entire time. Excellent pay and benefits, chill managers, fun coworkers, beautiful campus (back when we worked on campus in the before times ;-), interesting projects, given time to learn new skills, amazing work-life balance, etc.

amir734jj 4 years ago |

Microsoft azure edge platform. There is so much work to do and you never get bored. Humble coworkers generally. Slow paced but you can work on many things in parallel to avoid waiting.

If you live in Wisconsin, I highly recommend northwestern mutual which is a life insurance/financial company.

908B64B197 4 years ago |

> Project managers don't know anything about technology. There's an offshore team in Traansylvania busy making it a legacy codebase. They don't want to give developers raises...

These are all signs it's a company that happens to be doing tech instead of a tech company.

zippergz 4 years ago |

The flip side of "management don't know what they want the product to be" is "management decided what the product should be 3 years ago and won't adjust to the current reality, even though the company is failing." Be careful what you ask for.

stevage 4 years ago | |

Or management lets the latest big customer decide what the product will be.

sokoloff 4 years ago | | |

That's at least epsilon better than constantly letting the next big customer decide.

hammersmith 4 years ago |

I've never gone out of my way to try and get my friends to apply as I have for Ably Realtime(PaaS startup) I joined in the pandemic lockdown, and they just rolled with it. When things eased, all of the flexibility stayed. Best place I've worked as a parent.

bovermyer 4 years ago |

Apiture.

Fintech startup. Tech stack's recent. People are genuinely good and capable humans. Based out of North Carolina with an office in Austin, but 100% remote.

Truly awesome benefits.

I'm on the platform engineering team.

And yes, Apiture's hiring. Let me know if you want to apply - pretty sweet referral bonuses, haha.

autarch 4 years ago | |

The engineering job descriptions don't really indicate that it's 100% remote. They seem to suggest they're looking for NC-local candidates.

smoldesu 4 years ago | |

I'll start with some free QA: the Apiture website's favicon is still the WordPress logo on the search engines I checked :p

bovermyer 4 years ago | | |

Well that's strange... I don't see that, at least in Google.

quadcore 4 years ago |

Well I just tried to use glassdoor to try and grasp how it is to work at apple as a software engineer. Glassdoor is terrible. I think there is a business opportunity here. Make a site just for developers. Hackerdoors or something.

xtracto 4 years ago | |

Glassdoor is terrible particularly for startups.

I've known first hand of 4 small companies where management asked employees to write 5 star Glassdoor reviews and which I know they were terrible places to work.

cloverich 4 years ago | |

teamblind.com is closer. Lots of good commentary on various companies and hiring processes. The site itself is god awful (slow, tons of feature creep) but there's some good content on it.

Breefield 4 years ago |

Biased but I've been at ClassPass for 6.5 years for a reason. Everyone has such great attitudes and work life balance is really excellent.

As someone working in the backend I'm super stoked to be able to work with Kotlin in our services.

steve_taylor 4 years ago |

Have you considered that you might be unemployable? Don’t take it the wrong way. It’s a common trait of startup founders. A big part of their motivation is often that they don’t want to go back to working for other people.

riffic 4 years ago |

county libraries.

quadcore 4 years ago | |

Haha. Wait, are you serious?

bergerjac 4 years ago |

This question is a Catch-22…

I know a Mexican, who knew that his way out, was by getting in somewhere better. He applied to a German University, with zero experience with the German language. But on the application he lied and marked 'Conversational fluency'… he was accepted, leveraged his new location, and since has been the 1st CTO of multiple companies.

The people who have a little bit of humble audacity & spontaneous enthusiasm, will find a way, and gravitate towards each other.

The problem with this question, is trying to avoid companies that "don't suck"… instead, the aim is to find an amazing company. (Some readers will shrug off this distinction, and the successful will have an 'A-ha!' moment) Because amazing companies filter out average people who are only trying to avoid non-suckiness.

Amazing companies hire amazing people.

shrimpx 4 years ago |

Targeting Transylvania as a home of shitty offshore teams is in poor taste.

ethbr0 4 years ago |

Home Depot IT, surprisingly enough.

Out of all the companies I've worked at, it was a surprisingly refreshing experience. I didn't know a company could be that big and that entrepreneurial at the same time.

drBonkers 4 years ago | |

How are the referral incentives at HD?

ethbr0 4 years ago | | |

Inbound? (current employee referring new employee)

Not sure. I don't think they have any, but there might be something of the sort.

I don't work there anymore, as got an offer I couldn't refuse and made the move. HD pay is mid non-SV, but Atlanta is pretty cheap to live in. Especially compared to west coast insanity.

I will say it's one of the few places I've ever worked that I seriously considered taking lower compensation in exchange for better culture, tech strategy, and colleagues.

gstovall 4 years ago |

I work at Mercury Banking Solutions, and I've loved my time there. Everyone is whip-smart and helpful. I both feel like I'm playing up, but also get the support to rise to the challenge.

palencharizard 4 years ago |

Atlassian has amazing work/life balance and lots of very smart people who are happy to share knowledge with you and are easy to talk to. Pay and benefits are holistic and competitive

plow-tycoon 4 years ago |

PDFTron in Vancouver is alright. I didn't vibe with my manager or the rest of my immediate team well, but the rest of the company is alright with not much bureaucracy and some smart people working on a niche product. I burnt out in part because they had me do customer support while trying to deliver features, so I was terminated, but they're still alright if they can figure that out. I have ADHD and my manager didn't seem to understand how I couldn't get back to people on time, so I quickly learnt to resent coming into work.

geitir 4 years ago | |

Sounds like it wasn't really alright

plow-tycoon 4 years ago | | |

Maybe it was just marginally better than previous places. The actual leadership is alright, they just had unreasonable expectations for me personally. But hey, I'm still unemployed almost two years later, so if anyone's looking, hit me up :)

ruffrey 4 years ago |

Consider working for yourself under a corporation. Quick to be hired, fired, and fire your customers. You may be the best boss you've ever had.

foogazi 4 years ago |

Haven’t seen this mentioned in the top comments:

How’s your network ? Usually that’s a good way to go - find someone you enjoyed working with and see were they are

_zbkl 4 years ago |

Anybody here from Workday? Their online presence is very pro-employee but I'd like to confirm it from someone inside.

aristofun 4 years ago |

For me it’s hard to find a company wich has a cause I want to fight for.

Most of the companies do meaningless things (from my perspective).

ioseph 4 years ago |

Might depend on your country but federal government. Good pay, job security and a clear path for career progression.

openthc 4 years ago |

I've heard OpenTHC is pretty cool ;)

OliverGilan 4 years ago |

Not Microsoft

datakid 4 years ago |

RStudio. I've been shocked at how healthy, happy, and friendly their culture has been.

f1gm3nt 4 years ago |

Personally I look for small or startup type companies. I’ve learned that VC backed companies are usually cut throat and not creative. You will get paid more, but there is a cost to that. It’s a numbers game with VC backed companies. Burn and churn. Large companies it’s hard to add value. I worked at Salesforce for about a year before I quit. One of the best companies I ever worked at as far as perks go.

I also don’t have a college degree but have the experience to back me up. I’ve noticed at organizations where they hire fresh out of college or bootcamps is just a bunch of people that would rather talk computer science than write code that can be read in the future.

The best companies are hard to find gems that look like shit from the outside. For example, one company I worked for would dispute every Glassdoor review that wasn’t a 5 star saying it was a disgruntled former employee. It was a highly toxic company with amazing reviews on Glassdoor. Compare that with the company I’m at today that has just over a 3 stars.

The best companies that aren’t complete shit will empower you and encourage you to be your best. They understand they hire for your expertise and get the fuck out of your way. They demand results and also realize that results can take time. Not many people are able to work in this type of environment. You’re essentially looking for a company who treats employees like a team. Just like any professional sports team, the worst players are cut. However, the company also understands balance and sees excessive working as a problem. You’re looking for a company where the one doing the hiring is looking for someone smarter than they are.

In my opinion, the best way would be to read the reviews, and I mean really read the reviews you find online. Why are people saying what they say? Are they new hire reviews? Research the executive team and anyone else you can find at the company on LinkedIn. Before you go to any interview do research on the company and come prepared with questions you want answered based on your findings. Ask the company why you should work for them without being direct. Try talking to others who work there and get a feel for their personalities. If you smoke, go find where the smokers are and start conversations with them. If you get an offer, negotiate a contact for 90 days. During those 90 days, you want to keep interviewing the company. How’s the onboarding? Are they setting you up for success? Is there politics? Are there any assholes? Look for any red flags. There might be warning flags but the point is, you both are testing each other out.

Every company will have its pros and cons. I’ve decided to work at smaller companies which pay a little less but I have more opportunities to learn and grow vs a larger company where I’m a one trick pony.

hacktember 4 years ago |

I currently work at project44 and it's really nice here!

nomaroma 4 years ago | |

My former coworker is at Project44 and says otherwise… unfortunately. I was going to apply until they sent me this text:

“Exec team varies greatly in aptitude from what I’ve witnessed. Some are forward thinking, some appear to be in over their heads. Frankly, everyone is solely focused on sales or recruiting.”

goatherders 4 years ago |

GoDaddy and Dell are both excellent places to work.

wly_cdgr 4 years ago |

In my experience, there's no substitute for putting in the hours of painstaking research: scouring job boards and sites like levels.fyi for companies you haven't heard of yet, exploring their websites, looking at the professional profiles and blogs of the employees, etc. Every once in a long while, you find something really legit - places like Brilliant, McMaster-Carr, Bitwise Alchemy. IMO the better the place the more likely it is to be somewhat under the radar

amelius 4 years ago |

Perhaps someone can write a review-website for jobs.

id 4 years ago | |

They should call it glassdoor.

hacktember 4 years ago |

Currently working at project44 and love it here!

grcevski 4 years ago |

elastic

b0bd0bbsb0b 4 years ago |

Whoever pays the most. At some point most of us get inspired by WuTang and take the "Cash Rules Everything Around Me" mentality. Work is where we trade our bodies and our limited lifespan for money 8-12 hours per day. I personally just shut my brain off or detach completely, get my work done, then get back to my life.

Whoever pays the most sucks less. Otherwise, all things being equal, all companies are going to suck, especially if you work for yourself.

max0563 4 years ago | |

I personally work for myself, and I have found it to be very rewarding and fulfilling. It's not for everyone, but for for some it is certainly far more rewarding than working a 9-5. Especially one where you feel like you have to turn off your brain for 8 hours which I find to be very unfortunate.

To some extent I agree with your mentality. I don't think we should treat work as anything other than that - trading your limited time for money. But you spend so much of it on this thing, work, that turning off your brain to engage in it seems just depressing.

swiley 4 years ago |

Who doesn't force drugs on their employees?

pshc 4 years ago |

Stripe comes to mind. I haven't worked there so I don't actually know.

auntienomen 4 years ago | |

I'd love to hear firsthand comments on Stripe.

orangepurple 4 years ago | |

Delete

pshc 4 years ago | | |

Haha wow I'm getting wrecked for that suggestion. Why?

two people get the same constructive feedback, one person goes "wow, I am getting feedback that will make me grow" and the other person goes "ouch my boss wounded my ego, I hate it"