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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> that even in sucky workplaces,

I would say... if there is a company with 6,000 employees... it's going to depend way less on the company and more on the team. Your direct manager, your teammates, the other teams you work with, the other managers involved... that can all wildly vary even within the same company.

They are fluid too. People come and go. Circumstances change.

I don't know how much top-down leadership effect really has. If the CEO + board of a 20,000 person company feel a certain ideology, is it really passed down 10 layers lower to managers working on small projects?

I had a team and project I really enjoyed for 4 years, then poof it was all gone when the executive team decided to buy a competitor and scrap our team. You never know what might happen!

IDK about 20k people companies, but they can have drastic influence into 2k companies.

Yes, if the new CEO decides to fire all the management who has been there for a while, replace them with his buddies, and drastically lower the hiring bar so the buddies can hire their buddies.

I used to agree but after working at Amazon... yes, it really is passed down.

There is still large variation per org/team, but there are definitely a lot of things that can permeate all the way down. The way hiring is done, the way performance is evaluated and promotions/raises are done, the way weekly org-wide metrics meetings are done, the way escalations are handled, even the way we hold meetings or write documents... At Amazon, all of these things are influenced (or directly guided) by processes that are put in place by the highest levels, and they really do have enormous impact on the overall culture of the company.

I don't know, I think it's pretty easy to ask questions for this during an interview process even if you have those "champions". Just ask "what are the current pain points and things that can be improved about the company?" If they give an honest answer then take it at face value. If they just bullshit you by talking around the question or flipping the question and talking about a "good problem to have" then you probably don't want to work there.

> "good problem to have" then you probably don't want to work there

Well it's a tradeoff:

[growing pains] = [potentially valuable stock options]

[ever changing technical choices] = [not boring / not stagnating]

I think it also just depends on the person. I've been in workplaces that felt great to me, and seen people leave because they found it sucky.

Similarly I have also left due to suckiness despite some people seeming to enjoy themselves. Though of course that may just be an act.

Often the people making it sucky have no idea.

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