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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

Companies that use the: recruit a lot of people, burn out most, rinse and repeat strategy are fairly easy to identify.

As an employee you should have your eyes open about this but it’s not necessarily the case that they should be avoided at all costs. Properly used, time at one of these companies can change the trajectory of your career. Depending on where you are in life that can be worth it.

Having a time boxed plan makes it more likely you can survive the experience with your health and sanity intact.

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There is a lot of reporting about companies in two areas I am familiar with: video games and entertainment. Both industries are aware that there are a lot of young people really desperate to break into them. Not all companies take advantage of that, but many do.

Some game companies that have only really young workers below senior management and explain this by saying older people don't get what they are doing. They say it quietly, and indirectly because it opens them up to discrimination lawsuits. But what it really means is experienced people aren't putting up with something about the company.. the hours, the management, something. And unfortunately this does not really seem to be an impediment to their success.

I was working at such a place when the 2008 recession happened. That was brutal. I still have health issues from that experience.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Your plans to get out quick may run into economic epicycles and then your clever plan ain’t so clever.

I had a similar experience at the same time.

Yup.... for me it was Amazon. And I was in H-1B back then, so I just put it up with it for a while, until the economy improved. The company had such a weird culture. It was pretty stressful.

The most insidious thing they did was delay the green card application as much as they could, and just drag things out on purpose. Since I am Albanian/European, I could get it faster as my country is not on the per country cap that Indian and Chinese applicants are. They knew it, as they kept dragging out the first stages of the applications on everything. It was mental abuse.

By 2011, the economy was recovering, and I did switch, but I had to redo all the green card application stuff again.

Not many realize this, but having the green card process drag out long has a detrimental effect on the whole job market, not just for the specific immigrant.

Yes, It creates serfs/indentured servitude. Both the H1B visa and GC application should belong to the worker/applicant, with conditions (as long as they are employed with the given salary, pay taxes, etc...).

The employee should just be able to do the process themselves, and handle it the papers with their own lawyer.

It is clear that the H1B is setup to maximize the benefits to large corps, and not necessary the american economy/people.

It’d be nice if there existed any forum that collected these anecdotes. Glassdoor is heavily censored, teamblind requires tying your identity to the account, etc. Lots of toxic workplaces exist and remain unknown outside of rare Twitter threads.

This is tricky. I don’t necessarily disagree, but evaluating these things can be more difficult for some people.

For me, it’s very easy for me to get attached because I care about some combination of the problem and the team. I’ve had some major wins improving things in those cases, but I’ve also had some major losses. And it’s very difficult for me to recognize burnout symptoms until they’re severe enough to require extensive recovery time.

Sure, the idea of timeboxing could be useful, but I could also just let that slide given my motivation to improve things. In the end, it’s not worth it to me anymore to put myself in that situation.

Easy to identify? What are the signs, save for things you could only be told by a friend on the inside?

High turnover, especially if there’s a big peak at 2-3 years of experience.

For mid-career professionals, you should be able to tell this from your second or third degree network on LinkedIn or similar. For students, you should be suspicious of any company that’s hiring a lot of fresh grads unless they are gigantic (in which case, consult the alumni whisper network).

Cerner in KC is like that. Grab all the college grads, burn them to death for 3 to 4 years, cull the herd.

https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/cerner-layoffs-part-of-...

Here is example of the culture: https://www.bizcominthenews.com/files/cerner-1.pdf

that would be from then-CEO Neal Patterson, from Wikipedia :

Patterson is infamous for an email[7] scolding managers for not coming to work before 8 am and leaving before 5 pm, now a prominent example used when discussing email netiquette. On the day that the email was posted to Yahoo!, the company's market cap fell by over 22%[8] from a high of US$1.5 billion.[9]

[7] "BBC News - AMERICAS - Boss's e-mail bites back". BBC. Archived from the original on February 8, 2009.

[8] ..

[9] Flynn, Nancy; Kahn, Randolph (2003). E-mail Rules: A Business Guide to Managing Policies, Security, and Legal Issues for E-mail and Digital Communication. AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn. p. 45. ISBN 9780814471883. netiquette.

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

This is highly sector dependent. I've worked at startups for almost my entire career and a big peak of leaving engineers at 2-3 years wouldn't even cause me any concern. In the 10 years in industry I've worked I'd argue the average engineer leaves around the 5 year mark. This typically coincides with a failed seed round or reaching a terminal title (senior, staff, etc) and not being able to go further.

The fresh grads case is a good point. The one company I left fairly quickly was almost entirely powered by intern/junior labor. Seniors left quickly due to a combination of bad management, low advancement opportunities, and constantly having to re-train people. This, I think, is worth looking out for.

If they are specifically recruiting people from out of town, they are most likely doing so to get away from the existing whisper network.

That is one thing we are going to be writing extensively about regarding remote jobs in the coming years.

This. And when they burn you out and you have no support network or family and programming jobs in the area are all full of programmers who got fired from X, because you moved there.

Lucasfilm tried to recruit me once-- which would have been my dream job-- but couldn't match what I was being paid in Orange County. The recruiter actually tried to convince me my housing costs would be less in the bay area. I had family in the bay area and they all confirmed that Lucas was a notorious abusive employer.

I had a similar thing with Dreamworks-- they best offer they could make was 25k less than I was making at the time.

Hiring loads and loads of fresh grads and then making your campus feel just like college so your amenities can trick them into working 60-hour weeks.

For small companies, I feel like checking out how many people used to work there(and when they left) on LinkedIn vs. how old the company is works as a really great metric. If you’re looking at a 100 person company that appears to have more former engineers than a 500 person company in the same timeframe… we’ll just leave it at that.

Every one of your interviewers says they have great work life balance while looking like an extra from a zombie movie. Dark circles around the eyes, bags underneath.

To be fair, in my case that’s because I play computer games until 2am, nothing to do with my job that ends at 6pm.

That's what the "every single one" qualifier is for :)

One is how much they expose you to the team you will join / consistency of information about the size / location / roles within the team during the interview process.

I once joined a team that had 40% sustained turnover for the 5 years I stayed on. I only stayed because they basically golden handcuffed me.

Despite interviewing with 6-7 different individuals 1-on-1, only 2 of them were actually future team mates.

By the time I joined, I discovered that on my team of 5: - manager had joined weeks before interviewing me, replacing the long time team lead who had been fired - 2 guys were being fired & I was to take on their responsibilities along with the other guy they just hired (who was a flake, so I took on 2 jobs within 3 months) - I was the first person to sit in-office, the rest were remote, this meant a disproportionate support burden went to me immediately despite being new and not knowing the platform

It was also the first place I ever worked where it was normal for people to get fired in their first year. Not sure how you ask about that in an interview though, lol.

> It was also the first place I ever worked where it was normal for people to get fired in their first year. Not sure how you ask about that in an interview though, lol.

There is a way, actually.

One of the things you want to ask when joining a non-tiny company is about the overall retention figures. Average/median tenure is a good start, especially coupled with a question on what the company does with their exit interview data. You could also ask for a rough bucketing on the tenure: how many people stay beyond 1y/3y/5y.

It's going to be a rare company who can (or will) share even semi-accurate figures, but you should be able to get a decent grip on the fractions. Also, if those in the company who are supposed to know this are evasive about the question, that's a red flag all on its own right.

I hope all people start asking such questions. It will bring more accountability and will make it difficult for toxic companies to hide their issues.

Maybe candidates can start asking for a company's "resume"?

This happened to me at the last job, and I've commented something similar once: the interview experience and the first couple of month experiences were so different I've got no qualms saying it straight up: I felt lied to.

On top of joining a team that felt completely bootstrapped and thrown together for my arrival and included ZERO engineers with domain knowledge or familiarity on the system they had just been pulled off of systems they'd built and maintained for the last several years to this new team I was hired into, two people left within the first two months, another got fired due to ongoing and apparently continued behavioral issues, and a third appeared on my team out of nowhere. Got pulled into a zoom call one day "So and so works for you now" and that was it.

All of this after an interview process where I was assured: "these guys have been working on this since inception".

The place was absolutely bonkers compared to the interview, and I thought I had done a pretty decent job peeling the layers of filibustering answers when I would inquire about things like turnover, team sizes, promotions and firings, open positions/how long they'd been open et al. Or at least the recruiter I worked with leading up to getting an offer letter was more than forthcoming and transparent about this stuff....

...except THAT person ended up quitting two weeks before I did.

I was interviewed at a place we all have heard of, talked first to the hiring manager over the phone. It went well, so we scheduled an in person interview a week later. When I got there, I asked hey where is the hiring manager that I talked to? The answer was: well he got into a disagreement with the CEO (whose name rhymes with Dion) and he no longer works here. What a first red flag!

There’s tournament model and then there’s just straight up dysfunctional.

i would ask what is their opinion regarding overtime. it’s a good measure of toxicity if overtime is expected (excluding emergencies), whether it is paid or not.

I find that Blind discussions are pretty representative, but it's mostly abour larger companies. For every Amazon there are hundreds of smaller companies.

But, we as a community should get better at calling these companies out publicly. Especially if they show up in a comment on the monthly hiring post. Don't let your fellow engineers get burnt. More community cooperation in this regard would go a long way.

You don’t need to go public, companies that relying on burning people out simply deserve zero respect from their employees.

Remember as critical as everything seems it’s no longer your problem once you move on. Sure, moving on to your next job might seem to be leaving them in a lurch, but lack of redundancy isn’t your problem.

PS: The best thing you can do for your teammates in that situation is convince them to find a better job.

Cancel culture doesn't have to be used for everything (and IMO should not be used for _anything_). Mob justice won't fix the company, and if the company is big enough (perhaps some SV companies who shall not be named), it won't have any real effect. Burnout is often an acceptable "work hazard" for the CV reputation gained. A good parallel to this is finance where burnout is practically built into the program. Medicine also crosses my mind when thinking of fields where burning yourself out could, counter-intuitively, be considered highly beneficial as a long term play.

Outlets for this already exist in the form of Glassdoor but much like every other review service once it reaches scales the usefulness of the reviews falls precipitously.

You also open yourself up to libel claims. Assuming your canceling actually works I would not be surprised if the company spent significant effort to take you to court and financially ruin you. Even more so if the accusations aren't entirely true (perhaps it's just one division and not the entire company).

Instead, it's probably more useful to _train_ people to notice these things and ascertain the risks. Burnout can often be worth it if the net-gain-after-burnout improves your prospects to advance in your field, confers a pedigree, or any other number of small things. Returning to the finance example this is certainly why people risk it. At the end of the day, in the US at least, a little over half of the states in the union are right-to-work. This is the safety valve for companies who deliberately churn employees - just leave. Ideally after you've already lined up a new gig in your field.

Easy to indentify because it's all of them. Not everyone burns out at every company and some people really do switch for a better opportunity, but burnout is very common and is everywhere.

Maybe I'm strange, but the idea of starting a new job with the intention of quitting doesn't sit right with me. To me, that would be like getting married with the intention of getting a divorce.

I know that realistically, I'm probably going to find a different job at some point, but it's always been a natural progression and not a planned movement.

So every job acceptance has to be accompanied by a lifetime commitment? That sounds even stranger.

Maybe marriage wasn't a good simile...

I've never started a job thinking "I'm going to work here for X years, and then quit (for Y reason)". I've also never started a job expecting to work there for the rest of my career, although I would be happy if it was a good job and I did.

I might end up quitting my current job after a year or two, I might be here 10 years, maybe I'll leave in a casket. I don't have a set date for when I'll quit.

My father has had the same job for over 40 years. He's had different roles (originally a telecommunications rigger, now a network engineer) and worked for different companies (buyouts etc.), but he's never actually had to apply for a new job. He's enjoyed his work and had a good career.

I guess there's not many jobs like that these days though.

I suspect Netflix is one of these companies.

I'd love to work there but I struggle to justify the burnout that will result i'm not 20 anymore.

> Companies that use the: recruit a lot of people, burn out most, rinse and repeat strategy are fairly easy to identify.

How?

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