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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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

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.

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.

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