Easy to identify? What are the signs, save for things you could only be told by a friend on the inside?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
That is one thing we are going to be writing extensively about regarding remote jobs in the coming years.
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.