How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside? | Hacker News Reader

How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?

charity.wtf

121 pointskiyanwang155 comments

> This is a GREAT one: “As a white man, I’d ask what they’ve done to find qualified women and minorities for the role I’m interviewing for.”

I can't help but feel that asking questions during an interview that encourage the interviewer to hire someone who is not you, is a bad strategy for actually getting the job.

Yeah this one works both ways all to well haha. Mah boi probably realizes it too and that's why he's asking it.

Getting _the_ job, not necessarily.

Getting a job in a decent and self-aware team, on the other hand, yes, that's a good strategy.

The question is both a direct and an indirect one.

A decent and self-aware work team is one who treats each other as equals and respect and keeps their political beliefs outside the work environment.

An iterviewee who brings race into the discussion clearly doesn't understand work/personal boundries and is going to be a liability.

That makes sense to me. Discussing non work related politics with coworkers seems like a bad idea. No idea why that was downvoted.

I had a weird interview last year. After about 30 minutes talk, the guy started shifting to politics and expressing his ideas about Europe, the UK, refugees, etc. I didn't want the job anyway so I told him that I don't agree with his (barely contained) right wing opinions. He immediately told me that things are not going to work, and I agreed.

Having early 20 somethings doing interviews alone is asking for trouble. Talking about politics during an interview strikes me as a recipe for disaster by creating a highly homogeneous environment. I like variety

Diversity in the workplace is a work issue.

If that’s political, well, work _is_ political too (and even work organization becomes quickly political).

Only if diversity is relevant to whatever value the business is providing or it's mission.

Healthy work issues are centered around whatever's going to help the company succeed. People want coworkers who produce and are positive. It affects everybody's livelihood.

Diversity is always relevant in business, as business is a part of society, which itself is very much diverse.

That's the whole point. Cutting oneself out of society, being a person or a group, has never been a good idea in the long run.

1. Being self aware does not mean that you’re good but that you know where you can improve.

2. That’s precisely the (indirect) point. An interviewee that brings this question WANTS to be seen as a liability by a team/manager that understand the question as a “outside-of-work-boundaries-political-belief, and WANTS to understand how a diverse team articulates the answer.

Sorry, the work environment is inherently political these days.

I'll "keep my political beliefs outside the work environment" when it's no longer political to say that

- Women, queer people, and minorities should be hired, treated, and paid the same as straight cis white men

- Abusive and exploitative treatment of workers is unacceptable

- Every human being deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of where they are on a corporate org chart

You say people should "keep their political beliefs outside the work environment" as if the managers, directors, C-suite, etc aren't imposing their political beliefs on us every moment of every day.

> - Women, queer people, and minorities should be hired, treated, and paid the same as straight cis white men

No they should not. They should be paid similar to someone with similar work experience, skills, potential and likability. It has nothing to do with someone's skin color or sexual orientation.

Your statement does not contradict parent.

You misunderstood one of the two statements.

Or, you don’t understand from your perspective how the two are not contradictory.

Unless, there’s something unexpressed in either of those.

For instance, a more or less official/understood work policy not being effectively equal regarding skills, in hiring, because of (un)acknowledged bias. Or, an understated motive to do more than only fair hiring or affirmative action to counter a acknowledged bias in hiring.

Oh, good god. I did not think it was necessary to state that qualifier, as it should be obvious to just about anyone.

The parent was just saying that there should not be discrimination, that those people should be treated equally as well.

You are violently agreeing.

> Sorry, the work environment is inherently political these days.

For most companies it isn't at all. They consentrate on issues relevant to staying competitive in the market.

I agree that actual cases of discrimination should be addressed and corrected.

Putting forth the ideology that "people" are "imposing their political beliefs on us every moment of every day" says more about you than it does anyone else.

Because that's exactly what you are doing.

But discrimination in the workplace IS a competitive issue.

Both in the company own market, because it WILL impact the company own teams and governance in the long run, if only in comparison with other companies,

AND in the employment "market", because the company is cutting itself off of a significant talent pool.

Have the people in this thread ever actually interviewed and hired people in the last decade?

It's a super softball question that gives that gives the interviewer a chance to brag about any small advancements they've recently made.

In 2022, if a hiring manager didn't have a decent response to this question locked and loaded, it would be a super red flag.

This is a shibboleth virtue signal. Neither side takes it at face value

I wonder if we're headed to a point where this kind of self-selection basically creates companies consisting of either people who are all about DEI, or people who only care about skills/qualification, then the market will decide which one is the winning strategy.

The DEI people seem to me like they have a tendency to try to enforce their view via legislation. So I'm skeptical about the "market will decide" part.

Could someone comment on the down votes? The legislation is happening already, so I'm not sure why this is so controversial.

I didn't downvote you but I'll have a go.

The rabid activists who are pushing their agenda of mandated quotas for special interest groups do not like it when you or others like you suggest logic and rational things that don't support their agenda.

Hence, the downvote. More goodthink, citizen!

Maybe in the US, but then in comes down to competition with China

Really like a lot of things, it's both.

Anecdotally, I think the companies where the focus on these sort of virtue signal things is the highest are those the least subject to market pressure. A trucking outfit competing on price is not going to waste money on a diversity officer or whatever, but a Canadian retail bank can create all sorts of elaborate bureaucracy and rituals without fear of having to actually compete.

Or corrupted governments will decide. Is there a difference nowadays?

All you can really say there are governments that are "less corrupted" or at least "less authoritarian", they're all corrupted to the core, but some actually do good work in some cases because they have to answer at least in part to voters unlike in authoritarian countries where the only question they'll ask themselves is "will this be bad enough to incite a rebellion"

There's a lot more groups of companies than that. There's companies which primarily select for people from the most prestigious school or for people with connections to people who already work there, or actively avoid the candidates the DEI people would prefer even if they're clearly the best option. Companies full of people who genuinely care only about skills and qualifications are very rare and generally don't stay that way for long. You only need one person in a position of power whose goal is to hire their friends for things to go wrong.

Also, laziness/efficiency or maybe constraints that the real world imposes on hiring. It's very hard to effectively gauge skill during a few hours with someone or initially during a few seconds with their resume. If you find an effective proxy metric for skill and aptitude (like a degree from a league university) and after applying that simple filter still get a sufficient number of strong hires it will be very tempting to go down that path and save time interviewing. This usually will mean dismissing people with unusual backgrounds.

Many may be cynical.. but, say, Chloe Valdary's Theory of Enchantment looks wonderful. https://theoryofenchantment.com/

At least, I found its principles striking:

1. Treat people like human beings, not political abstractions.

2. Criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy.

3. Root everything you do in love and compassion.

Thanks for sharing this. I'm down so far.

I realized I've taken on a lot of identity-separatism baggage, even as I strive to avoid it. I'm trying to counter that by intentionally reincorporating Marxist and other class-conscious frames into the way I interpret interpersonal interactions. It's slightly embarrassing to be a professional with a chewy punk center, but I remind myself that I too am a wage laborer.

It does look wonderful, but I wonder how it holds up in big organisations where your counterpart does not in fact have your best interest in mind. This can happen because either they're guarding their little fiefdom and/or because they are competing for limited promotion spots. I've seen many a team go under because some of their people behaved basically according to the Theory of Enchantment principles, and were manipulated into doing all the work by a few people spending all their time on taking the credit.

Diversity has nothing to do with company culture being good or bad in most cases.

Example: Let's say the company has 100 employees and 90 of them are white and 10 of them are black. As a white engineer, it won't help you if they invite more black people to work there.

It's much harder to know if 90% of them are assholes and diversity will never help with that.

In my experience it can be a bit of a canary.

People who are assholes tend to be extra-assholey to out-groups (which often is minorities). If members of minority groups don't want to work somewhere it usually means that the people who work there are assholes.

I know this is the classic thinking about these things. But working in a company where they keep bringing in new employees that are rude (the "strong woman" template), it has given me something to think about.

It's just not a given that reducing out-groups makes a company culture better. It can make it worse to include those groups sometimes. It's just hard to know before.

But it's morally right to not exclude people so I'm of course supporting that. Just saying it may not be a sign of a good culture even though we may think it is.

> keep bringing in new employees that are rude (the "strong woman" template),

I've been working professionally for decades and I don't think I've seen this 'template' at all.

And to be honest I'm wondering if this is a case of the 'same behavior is perceived as ruder in women than in men' effect.

I had the misfortune of interacting with what OP is calling "strong woman template" and they were as pleasant as any men with "tough guy" attitude. Rude, obnoxious, entitled, unkind, and always on edge. At least these are the common attributes I found common in people I thought of when seeing "strong woman template"

It's pretty much in every tv show if you watch TV. Strong woman = rude woman. Which I think is so stupid. It's not strong to be rude to people. It's just bad behavior and turns you into a bad person.

It has gotten to the point that we now have "strong wimen" insulting men everywhere but if the tables are turned, men cannot be rude to wimen because that's completely unacceptable.

Whoah there tiger.

I'm a white cisgendered able-bodied conservative male and I think you're probably an unhappy person..

You are likely sexist with prejudice about normative gender roles.

Would you call a man doing the same thing a 'strong man?' Or are you referring to the southpark version of strong woman?

You haven't had enough jobs to make a statement like that, no one has.

Your effortless translation of "90% white" to "assholes" is a bit of a tell. For instance, you're white, and used to thinking this kind of trashing a group of people is ok because of your socially dominant position. Because these whites resemble you physically right? But of course you mean the bad whites; you're one of the good whites!

It isn't ok, and let me remind you, you have no basis whatsoever to believe that teams which are 90% white are made up of assholes. It's something you made up and it's racially obnoxious behavior which you should stop immediately.

I think the point was that diversity is often lacking in situations with bad people, because those bad people behave in ways that undermine heterogeneity...especially by mistreating the people who are different.

Since racial heterogeneity is a more easily observable situation than, say, diversity of opinion, it's a healthy sign of a tolerant culture. That doesn't mean that a workplace lacking racial heterogeneity is bad. It simply lacks the canary. (If I'm interpreting GP properly.)

> diversity is often lacking in situations with bad people

Do you mean, like, ethnic crime gangs? Those come in white flavors too.

You, and GP, are just making stuff up that confirms your prejudices. You have no evidence of what you're saying whatsoever! All you're doing is stringing sentences together. What if I find one team of ten whites who are great to work with (say you're, I dunno Tongan?) and a team with every Benneton stripe who suck?

The kind of thinking you two are promoting here just throws that information right out the window, in favor of, what? Bad heuristics?

What should we call that? Stereotyping, right?

This is people's livelihood you're messing with here.

I completely agree with you. Where is the proof?

Proof of what? Racism in the workplace? Or bawolff's "in my experience" anecdote?

In this thread I think almost all of the non-fact-based commentary came from Sam, lol. I guess he feels strongly about the topic, but I think bawolff's argument isn't so easily disposable as Sam asserts. And telling someone that their experience is not valid is kind of strange on the internet because there's no easy way to know what bawolff's set of work experiences includes.

You can just divide the number of possible jobs for one human by the number of teams.

It's, wait for it, just like the realization that you can't know "black people", only some finite number of them.

You're showing motivated reasoning, because you're smart enough to follow that argument and chose not to. Not my problem, I'll never see your name on this site again.

This is pretty much nonsensical, but I appreciate you calling me smart.

You're not following my argument and you're expecting me to defend a straw man that you're trying to project onto me.

Huh? I'm not stating any personal opinions about race in the workplace here, and I don't appreciate you casting me as having done so. I was saying that you seem to have misinterpreted other guy's post as a false contrapositive.

Note the "I think the point was," and also the "If I'm interpreting GP properly."

Let me make it clearer for you:

"If the canary is alive, there's oxygen."

That was the GP argument. It's not the same logical proposition as,

"If there's no canary, there's no oxygen."

Please drop the flagrant language. You're way off base.

>I'm not stating any personal opinions about race in the workplace here, and I don't appreciate you casting me as having done so.

I, too, interpreted your original comment as "agreeing with" the original poster.

Your line about "If I'm interpreting GP properly." Came at the very end - after I (incorrectly) assumed you were aligned with GP

My conclusion is that this format isn't very good at difficult conversations

> My conclusion is that this format isn't very good at difficult conversations

I can agree with that.

I’ve generally enjoyed working with diverse teams. But the people who push DEI really hard tend to be insufferable.

Agreed on both points.

Regarding the latter, I feel that people in tech or finance who design their work personality to carry a sociopolitical banner are allocating brainpower away from the core business. At the very least, that can be annoying to colleagues who have to pick up the slack.

But to be circumspect about ethics in general...it's nice to work with good people, and good people often find it difficult to divorce their ethics from their actions because the alignment between the two things is part of what makes them good.

It's not a tell, I just used an example. Put any colors or genders in the example, the specifics don't matter for what I'm trying to say.

People forget that (1) women are not a minority, and (2) that tech is one of the kost diverse industries (full of Asians, Indians, immigrants, …)

That's why I prefer the term "marginalized groups".

That’s why I prefer the term “moving the goalposts”

It's not moving the goalposts; it's accurately portraying the concept that was imperfectly conveyed in the past by "minorities".

What explains this obsession with engaging in mental gymnastics just to call oneself “marginalized”?

Is it to explain away shortcomings? Seek reparations? The feeling of being part of a group? Or simply attention seeking?

I'm not trying to call myself marginalized. I am a cisgender straight white man.

Referring to marginalized groups is recognizing the very clear fact that certain groups of people have been historically, and still are, treated less well than those considered the "default" in-group due to aspects of themselves that are outside of their control.

The purpose is to become mindful of the biases that has introduced to our society, both conscious and subconscious, and do our best to consciously take those into account to counteract them.

...So let me ask you: What explains this obsession with engaging in mental gymnastics just to avoid calling people "marginalized"?

Is it to avoid having to change the way one thinks? Hold onto a perceived position of high status? The feeling of being part of a superior group? Or simply attention seeking?

> What explains this obsession with engaging in mental gymnastics just to avoid calling people "marginalized"?

Because I feel no need to bring nonsense labels and politics into an environment that should be a straight up meritocracy.

This is more often than not just an excuse for someone to prove “what a great guy” he is. Nothing more.

There is almost no value to the discussion except for self satisfaction gained by the “white knights”/“white saviors”.

I expect people to go to work to work, not to try to gain cool points for being so woke.

I have direct reports that are culturally, racially, blah blah blah very different from me. That comes up in our organization exactly never because it doesn’t matter. We hire people that demonstrate they will be successful and fire people that aren’t.

Expect special treatment because of some real or imagined injustice in the past? Please go somewhere else that is happy to make virtual signaling part of their PR strategy.

Which is why i used the term "out-group" first and foremost.

Women are not a statistical minority, but in social rights and power, they are still very much a minority. As such they get some legal and societal protection for that. Anything else is burying your head in the sand.

Name a single social right that women lack (in Western democratic states).

In a democracy, women (the majority) are the definition of power. In addition, they’re a big majority of college graduates and have more earning power/potential than men (on average) before they choose to have kids.

Maybe you didn’t intend it this way, but your statement is pretty much the default liberal argument of the past several years: “everyone who does or says something I don’t like is racist.”

As a result, calling someone “racist” has pretty much lost all meaning.

And it's hard to say whether that's just the local market for engineers or if a large employer nearby is pulling minority engineers at a higher than average rate that skews the local market for the rest of the potential labor pool.

In your example, I might question the lack of ANY other minorities in that company. In my local market, for example that 10% Black engineer number is way over-representing, but I'd expect ~30% minority for an average engineering organization.

Yup this is “what the hell” for me.

I’m Asian

Same, "what the hell", then I followed the link to twitter to see if it was a joke or troll, then another "what the hell"

I'm black

My brother from another mother!!! Welcome!

It reads as outright deranged in your quote.

If you're already interviewing, they are unlikely to restart the whole process based on that question, they will answer it and keep going.

Yes, but some of the other candidates may be non-white males. So why wait for the next interviewing round? The boss may not approve hiring for some time.

If you want to get the job above minorities then obviously don't ask about diversity like it matters to you.

Why? I bring that up in every job interview. None of them have ever found it objectionable. In my experience, except for some startups, it's something every company in tech is at least thinking about.

As an industry we are wasting so much potential. How many great candidates end up not interviewing with you when they see your entire tech staff consists of white and asian men aged 25-35?

As a visible minority, any such policy has me running for the hills. I'd like to be considered for my skill, because I know that I'll be working with people of a similar cut.

Granted its an archaic notion. Checking out from work, and checking in to DEI is probably a more financially successful endeavor.

I think it's a GREAT one; if the company engages in practices that are borderline illegal and immoral (considered so even by their supposed beneficiaries [1], and rejected by one of the most left-wing states [2]), it's probably a toxic place to work.

The entire DEI industry belongs to Golgafrincham Ark Fleet Ship B. It's good to know in advance if a company is taken over by this malignant growth.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ... [2] https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...

This would definitely be a bad sign for me during an interview, I would say "next" pretty quickly. I have enough to deal with at work I don't need a social warrior that is more worried about the woke twitterati rantings than helping me get next week's bucket of issues done.

Not only that, asking this question is a red-flag for the company to disqualify you.

Employees who are obsessed with diversity and social justice often create toxic environments and can even be a legal or security liability to the company.

That's the point. If the question led you to not get the job, it's not a job you would want in the first place.

I'm not sure the diversity stuff helps. People who look different can still be dysfunctional.

For me the big one is whether people in the interviews have the same mission. I went to an interview with a large investment bank where a friend turned out to be one of the interviewers. I thought highly of him, so naturally I thought his colleagues would be similar. He gave me the speil about what he does, sounded reasonable.

Then his five teammates spent an hour each with me, and they had 5 different stories about what the team does. They didn't seem to know that other teams in the same firm did the same thing and were in the news about it. Every single person gave their own version of how they fit in the team.

In the end the MD gave me a grilling about some totally irrelevant stuff, and then gave his version of the team.

I didn't proceed with the job. Caught up with my friend, and the MD is gone, along with most of the team. Friend is in another division. Another friend joined and left the group, which is yet another red flag.

Pardon my ignorance. What's MD in this context?

Probably "Managing Director".

Managing Director, it's a sort of middle management role that a lot of people aspire to. Running a team, getting paid fairly decently.

It does vary, but I wouldn't describe Managing Director as a team lead. In the UK it was often equivalent to CEO. It could be the head of a business unit.

Yes, someone on the board that takes an active role in the company, or higher (The CEO)

In the context of an investment bank (I’ve worked at both US and UK ones, though they are all multinationals really), MDs would really just be higher ranking middle managers. The highest ranked would be direct reports to the C level. Some are line of business or department heads. I know some traders were MDs despite being “individual contributors” and not desk heads, etc.

Tech MDs, as with tech employees in general, we’re always lower in status than business ones.

Probably the first level of title that is actually meaningful though. There are legions of “Vice Presidents” and “Directors” at investment banks. Whereas MDs are comparatively much rarer.

Recognise the investment banking job title inflation!

When a couple of people who used to work for me suddenly became Vice President, I congratulated them on their meteroic rise. Yeah, not so much they pointed out... :)

Similar thing happened to me when I was interviewing around. My resume and LinkedIn had my title as “Vice President”. It apparently intimidated more than one interviewer at the SV tech companies I Was targeting.

I came to the conclusion the title hurt me more than helped, since I had no desire to remain in the finance industry. So I replaced it with just a generic “senior SWE” title.

> it's a sort of middle management role that a lot of people aspire to. Running a team, getting paid fairly decently.

really, 7 figures a year is "getting paid fairly decently" ?

MD in IB is the equivalent of "partner" in consulting, law firms etc. But the IB companies all went public so there is no controlling "partnership". Like "partner" it's the highest rung in the hierarchy and the distinction between them comes down to what team/desk/department they run & additional executive titles.

Does a tech MD at an investment bank really get a seven figure compensation?

Pretty sure I’m making more as a FAANGMULA company vanilla senior SWE than my old bank department’s tech MD. I know I’m definitely making considerably more than was my old D(irector) who was one level down from MD (also since departed to a FAANGMULA company and now a personal friend).

Now if we’re talking about a business side MD, especially a trader, then that’s a whole different story.

> Does a tech MD at an investment bank really get a seven figure compensation?

Some desks make more of less, but why wouldn't they? MD's at Goldman used to even have a minimum salary of 500k[1] and bonus is generally a multiple of that... I'm not sure what you mean specifically by "tech" but Quant Strat, HFT etc are extremely valuable.

> Pretty sure I’m making more as a FAANGMULA company

You very well could be, big tech has been on a tear for a decade so equity compensation is ridiculous.

[1] https://archive.ph/H9eKK/again?url=https://www.wsj.com/artic...

I was referring to tech as in general SWEs doing line of business work, etc. which would account for the majority of SWEs at banks.

I would put stuff like quants and HFT at a bank in a more rarified, elite, niche - perhaps on a tier similar to the elite hedge funds like Citadel. They’re not what I would think of first when describing “tech at a bank/finance” though. But definitely would agree their prestige and compensation is much higher.

> I was referring to tech as in general SWEs doing line of business work, etc. which would account for the majority of SWEs at banks.

I wasn't on that side of the business & it was a long time ago... If they used the same level system as the front office, I would assume you would just have considerably less MD's and the pay would be at the lower end of the range but that would still put you at or close to 7 figures.

Managing Director

> I'm not sure the diversity stuff helps. People who look different can still be dysfunctional.

It's almost as if diversity is more than skin deep.

Tangent, but having worked in the IT departments of Wall Street investment banks and hedge funds for most of my career, I’ve noticed there is a distinct and extreme lack of female SWEs, as well as women in general. The few present tend to be BAs or PMs.

This is in contrast with tech companies where the male to female ratio both in general and in SWEs seem to be much more balanced.

"You want to work at a company on a strong growth trajectory for lots of reasons, but a big one is your own growth potential. You will learn the most the fastest at places that are growing fast, and have way more openings for promotions and leadership roles than a slower-growing company."

While I think this is a reasonable opinion, it's been my experience that companies who tout 'strong growth' are a cluster fuck. Communication quickly becomes a nightmare that is really hard to rein in. When that goes, there are a lot of likely outcomes -- none of which are good. Typically, the organization because fractured and siloed. That plucky team that punched above their weight, is now filled with a whole bunch of new people and the culture just became totally different. Now, there are a bunch of people pushing different agendas, and trying to get something done is no longer an engineering problem but also a political one.

You WILL learn a lot but, if my own experience is anything to go by, it will be lessons on how not to do things rather than "this is a good way to do things".

I've had the exact same experience. These sorts of environments seem to unintentionally reward assholes and bullies because they're the ones with the immediate means to get what they need in order to move their agenda forward. Chaotic environments are a breeding ground for strongmen.

>Chaotic environments are a breeding ground for strongmen.

In some cases, yes, but also a breeding ground for nimble people, clever people, and social people. It doesn't have to be bad, it can be good

It's interesting to me how trendy "diversity" is these days, and it's always in the context of race.

It's interesting how we don't ever think of diversity in terms of class, wealth, disability, etc. An Ivy League educated black person and an Ivy League educated white person are far more similar than a poor white person and a rich white person.

And yet, it seems as though we don't really care about hiring people from poorer backgrounds, maybe without college degrees, etc.

Besides, complaining about diversity in a place where there's just demographically not going to be that many minorities is a bit unnecessary. If your company is based in Duluth, Minnesota, which is 90% white, campaigning for a racially diverse company just seems kind of futile.

Diversity is always thought about in the contexts you mentioned. If you've had experiences that they haven't been, then those companies have fucked up D&I.

Anyway, good thing remote work exists. And not opening up to remote work already says a lot about inclusion in the company. So a company in Duluth wouldn't really have an excuse for having an all ablebodied, neurotypical, white straight men workforce.

>And yet, it seems as though we don't really care about hiring people from poorer backgrounds, maybe without college degrees, etc.

That's why these narratives are so attractive to the already rich and privileged. It deflects fault/polarization from their own classism. It's not your rich parents that are the benefactors and perpetrators of socially corrosive capitalism. It's some amorphous "whiteness" that is usually a proxy for poor white people.

> complaining about diversity in a place where there's just demographically not going to be that many minorities is a bit unnecessary

In the software industry, I suspect sexism and ageism are far more rampant than sexism, and women and older people are everywhere.

*than racism

What's particularly troubling is that the greatest value in diversity, comes from the diversity of perspectives, experiences, and ideas.

That kind of diversity has so many roots, that recruiting by race alone actually reduces intellectual diversity.

Modern HR diversity programs are more about virtue signaling and conformity - not diversity.

I am currently in my perfect job (scaleup, market leading tech product with two big moats, about to close series B.)

I know this lot are keepers because, this time around, I had the chance to come onsite (!) for the final round of negotiation and I got to meet two VPs, the chief architect, the managers of three other teams adjacent to the ones I was joining, another candidate (different role :), my upcoming manager (who had interviewed me, but this was much less formal) the lead partner engineer and the CTO.

Some of these were formal meetings but a lot of them were ad hoc 5 minute 1:1s I had while being shown around the building, being introduced to people. Everyone was open to talking about the company and I went armed with a laundry list of questions about the product to drive the conversations, mostly just letting them talk about engineering stuff.

This was all in addition to a phone screen with the longest serving engineer (an initial “sell” really, more than a screen) two rounds of interviews (pre- and post- take home test) where I also met two other managers and a future team mate. In total that’s something like a dozen meaningful interactions with employees from all parts of the tech org.

My top tips: make a point of finding out the roles of everyone you meet and insist your final on-site be scheduled around lunchtime with a tour of the office included.

The meta point being you can make the highest signal decision only once you’ve met as many potential colleagues as possible. It’s the people that make up a company culture.

I don’t know about that.

I had an interview very early in my career with a financial services company that lasted two days. I spoke with 12 (!!!) people. All of them asked me the same questions, and very few of the interviews were technical in nature.

What I learned from doing that is that they need a LOT of people to do anything, i.e., everything gets done slowly there.

I had an offer after meeting five people, the rest was me finding out more about them.

Depends. If you identify as a minority and want to exploit that, these hints are great. Also it might identify companies that have such great profits that they can easily afford spending money on being exploited. OTOH, this might exclude a lot of great companies specifically in niches with heavily skewed university alumni gender quotas, such as engineering in some countries. Be especially careful if this company then has lots of MBA types as leaders, because it is easier to get diversity hires with that background, instead of engineering background...

It seems that less technical the role, the longer an incompetent person can hide.

I interviewed with a company once who taught me to give the people interviewing you as much rope as possible, by which I mean ask them to tell you about the company, and then ask them to expand on what they said, and then ask them to expand again.

Two managers interviewed me first, proudly boasting that they don't do "Clone and Own" development. Wha...? Turns out they had one code-base, and everyone had to develop from that. Okay, fine, but... integration? "OH YEAH, that's another great thing!" I was told. "Just a few times a year, we have to make everything work together, so we go 24/7 to integrate it all, and IT'S GREAT, the upper management is there too on the weekends, and buys us pizza!". Okay, wow...

Then I talked to an engineer, and I asked them how often this "24/7" thing happened. They looked haggard and said, "it's going on all the time...".

I did tell the next manager/group-leader type about test-first development, and he seemed mildly interested.

Oddly enough, I didn't pursue the job opportunity there.

That was like reading a religious text or self help book - some helpful information and the odd insight scattered among a much more plentiful, hugely moralising nonsense.

There were many clues but this one stuck out for me:

> under-represented minorities (URM)

URM wasn't used anywhere else in the document which means it was a little teaching moment from the righteous to us poor yokels that conveniently also signaled their position amongst the righteous.

wtf indeed.

My two favourite questions to ask at interview are:

1. Tell me about a time things didn't go to plan and what you did about it afterwards?

2. Do you enjoy working here?

Of the two, the second one gives me the most useful signal. Every business has difficult times, so the first usually isn't too hard to answer, and they can gloss over stuff. The second one is more personal. Nobody can say no to that one. It's the way they say yes that's interesting.

> Do you enjoy working here?

I wouldn't ask non-factual questions. Of course the default answer is "yes". I wouldn't be able to answer such a question honestly in front of a stranger.

> I wouldn't be able to answer such a question honestly in front of a stranger.

For me it is even easier to be honest to a stranger.

"You may or may not find it as rewarding to work here as I have- of course it is a rollercoaster but I wouldnt still be here if I didnt like somethings about it but it is a job like any other."

Right.. maybe it's because it takes some experiance and consciousness to give such a response.

Well, I am looking for a bit more than just "yes". Some context has to be given.

In my last interview, there was a lovely, slightly panicked pause as the interviewers all looked at one another. Then the main interviewer said something like "Well, there are times it can be frustrating, it's not always a smooth ride. But I like the people I work with, the company is supportive and I get a kick out of it.".

I appreciated the honesty, and he seemed genuine. I took the job, and I can confirm everything he said was true :)

Cacklin'

I once had an interviewer tell me that he loved working there so much that he was happy to go to work every single day. Even when I explicitly asked him if there never was a single day where felt less happy he denied ever feeling anything other than pure joy for work.

At that point I concluded that he was either lying or unable to relate to people who are not happy all the time since he was supposed to be the supervisor it was one of the reasons to decline the job.

I do not see how diversity is a relevant factor. You can have a very diverse, shitty company and great non-diverse company. Anecdotal evidence: Company where I work at is likely not diverse according to woke standards, but it is a great place to work at.

I think it is important to praise diversity at every opportunity on your site for SEO reasons. I may be wrong. They call it "Machine learning fairness"

Glassdoor does it for me. Most reviews have a bias towards negativity (those with hard feelings will usually take the time to let everyone know), so if the reviews are extra negative it is a good sign to steer clear.

Reddit and HackerNews for more larger companies.

Also, recently discovered a Chinese language forum 1point3acrees where there is some real candid talk about the larger/FAANG companies and their offices around the world.

Glassdoor can be amazing at finding dirt on a company. ALWAYS sort by new. Many companies (unfortunately) incentivize their employees to write five star reviews. Those will show up first if sorted by Best.

Glassdoor is super useful & also just great entertainment

The last place I worked at had some serious issues going on internally. A couple hundred people but a basically non functioning HR department. People being yelled at by managers without repercussion. Also just bad engineering culture - top down directives that didn't make sense to be spending time on.

About once a month there'd be an extremely negative review show up on glassdoor highlighting what it was actually like. Directors go into crisis mode then a few days later the review is gone. Apparently if you pay Glassdoor you can have reviews removed by just telling them it's not factual. So unfortunately it just can't be trusted.

Nowadays I talk to someone that works there off the record, outside of the interview process. Ideally a friend of a friend.

If you get any sniff of non-meritocracy - run!

Meritocracy is a lie, a device to help rationalize the advancement of in-groups over other less privileged groups.

An analogy: as a parent you should probably not reward purely on naked results; you should stimulate and reward effort instead. The first option just reinforces existing traits; the second empowers actual self-improvement.

Not saying this is always easy or clear-cut. I understand the wish for getting rewarded for actual merit instead of politics, but meritocratic company or government policy is too short sighted and eventually harmful.

Maybe I'm a cynic but I believe the first order approach to "best performers win" is flawed, a cognitive error: The just-world fallacy is the cognitive bias that assumes that "people get what they deserve" – that actions will have morally fair and fitting consequences for the actor. [wikipedia]

Meritocracy is an ideal that is almost by definition unachievable. Like freedom, equality, etc. It’s a very worthy ideal.

Meritocracy means those who have lucky breaks early in life (schooling, opportunities, etc) earn compound interest on those choices.

If you could give everyone a "merit metric", and you had two options, one scoring 45 and one scoring 50, you'd chose the one scoring 50, without realising the the adversity the one scoring 45 has endured to get that far means they'll be operating at 55 or 60 in a year with the right environment, but the one that coasted at 50 for the last 10 years will continue to coast at 50.

Someone whose parents coached them in IT skilled for 14 hours a week for 10 years could have a higher "merit" score than someone that picked up 90% of the skills working on their own in 2 weeks, but would likely not be as good a hire

Sounds almost like you’re saying that it’s more meritocratic to hire for potential rather than actual/current skill.

As I said, meritocracy is an ideal to strive towards.

There is a great documentary on Amazon called Rickover: The Birth of Nuclear Power

People on the show attribute the success of the team he built because he hired for potential. His quote was something to the effect of that all good people already have jobs.

Did you know the term was coined in a satirical book about a dystopian society.

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

It should also be noted that the author directly says "It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit." in a quote that appears on the same Wikipedia page. There's more to that quote of course but the dismissive "meritocracy was coined satirically" soundbite erases the sensible arguments and warnings that the book tries to make.

Yep - luck matters way more than effort. Effort is the catalyst, luck gets you there.

Which gets to an interesting point: If an organization values the effort you put into failure, it's a company you very much want to work for!

I tend to think of luck like a multiplier.

Luck is a random # between -1 and 10 .

Reward = Effort * Luck . YMMV

How do I justify my career advancement as a non-privileged (according to woke standards) person w/o luck and the effort I put it to capitalize on that luck?

That’s only if you see positions in society as rewards. Then it’s easy to get upset about wealthy and privileged people lining their pockets and filling their board seats with friends and family.

If, on the other hand, you see positions as responsibilities then it’s much more straightforward to evaluate a meritocracy. On the one hand, we could be outraged that the king put his favourite nephew in charge of the army. On the other hand, we ask: is the nephew actually a capable commander? During peace time we can quibble over wealth and privilege but during a war I want the best commander to lead and protect us.

This characterization naturally extends to plenty of less urgent, but no less important positions. Do you care about how wealthy and privileged your heart surgeon is? Or only how skilled they are?

Almost everyone I've ever heard says that merit and talent don't count would rather argue politics and social issues than about which algo would best fit our scale out plans over the next quarter. I don't care about your position in life or your take on socialism vs capitalism. I want to do my work and go home, where I can choose to participate in politics, social activism, or play CoD on my own time.

What is advertised as Meritocracy is too-often more of a Metric-gamingocracy. Or is a place where management doesn't much care about "the bottom 90%".

> You want to work at a company on a strong growth trajectory for lots of reasons, but a big one is your own growth potential. You will learn the most the fastest at places that are growing fast, and have way more openings for promotions and leadership roles than a slower-growing company.

I would argue this one is a bit more subtle and has some game theory dynamics to it. Yes, it is strictly true that faster growth means more promo opportunities, however it also can hide a lot of problems and obscure your individual contributions. And it's not just politics or optics—as an IC it's just harder for you to really see and understand the true impact of your own work.

In a rocket ship environment where the business trajectory has already been established, engineering skill is useful but not strictly necessary for success. A lot of people learn more about working the system than they do about how to actually build things.

In a company is hot enough that they can draw heavily from Stanford/MIT and FAANG veterans, you find a lot of folks who have not faced real adversity in their work-life. Many have a sense of entitlement about getting promoted on a regular cadence and are more concerned with their promo packet than the quality of their work.

By contrast, there is tremendous value to working in startups or smaller companies that have traction but not hyper-growth. In these places you can move faster and get faster feedback. Impact is viscerally seen in the product, not abstracted beyond massive user numbers divided over thousands of engineers. If you grow up in this environment and then go to a bigger company you can see things others can't because people who spent their whole career in a big company optimize for delegation and communication rather than end-to-end understanding. Whether this translates into climbing the greasy pole I'm not sure, but I think it does give you more options to control your own destiny.

At my current job, my second interview was with the CEO and his primary question was: Who are you? And he made it clear he did not want to hear about my education and career so far. We basically talked about our lives. This made me clear that he values people more than results. I understands that he has interviewed everyone who joined the company (which is now about 60-70 people). I am not saying that my job is without stress, but in general, I am quite happy about it. I am in the software team of Bond3D which offers a 3D printing service for high performance polymeres and work on the slicer software that is used by my colleagues in other teams. The work I do involves more than just writing software but also understanding the printing process itself. I am motivated by the fact that the solutions I develop are immediately put to use by others to help them solve their problems.

I'm out of line for asking someone at the end of the interview if they want to ask anything else we didn't cover?

If they allow you plenty of time to converse with your interviewers throughout the process, great. If they tack on a cursory “any questions for us?” while wrapping up, they don’t think it matters what you think of them. Pull the ripcord.

I see the word cursory, but if the company does anything cursory, isn't that a warning?

I think the author means, if they ask "any questions for us?" at the top of the hour when the interview is about to end, it implies the interviewer didn't allot any time for the interviewee to ask any questions. According to the author, that implies a lack of courtesy and respect.

They like to move their managers around to give them experience with different aspects of the company. This means ambitious managers do short term things to make themselves look good which really screws IT.

I'm gonna let you in on a secret. Unless you're working for a charity, NGO, etc the company is almost always rotten on the inside. Don't ever go looking for a moral company, that's not what capitalism is. That's the nature of things. What you need to worry about is if the company will treat you well for what you bring to the table. If they don't then make sure you have an easy out in your contract. You should worry more about the team you will be working with and how they fit the way you like to work. Do you like to work alone with things throw over the wall? Do you like the product/service they provide? Do you like the pay? Do you like tight knit group that works closely and has lots of meetings? Those are few things you can eek out during an interview with some clarity. You will never know if the atmosphere is poisonous or not really until you get there.

> If you know any women or under-represented minorities (URM) who work there, buy them lunch and ask for the unvarnished truth.

I stopped reading right after this point.

I feel like qualifying companies as either "good" or "evil" are as unhelpful as the whole diversity section of the article.

There're two kinds of people: those who think life is a melodrama, and those whose moral opinions might be worth taking seriously

How about asking people who have worked there?

I don't think that a `diverse` environment represents a healthy environment. For now, `diversity` is just a buzzword like `machine learning`, `artificial intelligence` or `internet of things`. I believe that people should be hired based on their skills (including social skills).

In order to find out that the company is friendly, you should ask people that worked/are working there.

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