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Comment by romanhn | Hacker News Reader

Years ago I was interviewing for a software engineering role. At the end of one of the interviews I asked how they liked working there. And the interviewer caught me off-guard with "it kind of sucks". She went on to explain that the company recently promoted a bunch of youngsters into VP roles through a combination of nepotism and early start dates, and they didn't know what they were doing. I thanked her and politely bowed out of the process when the hiring manager reached out to me with the next steps.

This was Nvidia in 2006 and their stock is up about 200x since then.

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Nvidia, like many other tech companies, has many people/teams/departments/division. Is very hard to get a clear view of the world from a single point.

Who knows, maybe if you joined you would have hated it too, or loved it ! The story you shared is likely shared by many other companies that went through hyper-growth

TLDR: Stuff is hard!

NVidia was truly a spectacular opportunity. So was Microsoft, Databricks, etc. I picked a dud, and didn't realize it until it was too late (just now). Question is .. what are the obvious winners today, and for the next 10 years?

Some opportunities I missed but they didn't go anywhere: Docker, Qualcomm.

Consumer Devices is a general dud I think. Software and data is where it is at. I dunno?

Robotics

Any company to recommend in the domain? You are right that robotics has a good future. Just really capital intensive and hard to make money in the short term. I have a friend who is a founder in the space and man .. what a long slog.

BioTech :P

Really? Tell me more, please.

We will tell you in 15 days...

COVID-23?

On your masks, Ready, GO!

I remember losing a candidate to databricks around 2012/2013. I thought he was making a bad decision. Hoo-boy was I wrong.

Right, now he’s got really valuable Paper money that they offer to buy back at a very steep discount. Anyhow wouldn’t feel bad about missing that one!

Thats really funny because nobody says this when the interviewer is giving red flags that arent blunt like that

Even in other posts here, people are like “whew I wouldnt want to work for a company where an unrelated recruiter and hiring manager did something nonstandard” as if it was a predictor of their team

If "promotes people to upper management who don't deserve it" was a disqualifier then you would be left with exactly zero companies to work for. Ultimately you have to be able to tell whether it's a systemic problem or just one disgruntled employee.

You're right of course. However, interviewing is a game of limited information and I consider all signal I get from the company (after all, they're doing the same with me). I think a few things had to be broken in order for an employee to feel strongly this way, end up in the interviewing panel, and feel comfortable to share their views.

Nowadays it may be easier somewhat to get some insight into inner workings, but in 2006 there was no Blind, Glassdoor, etc. Sometimes the positive signals outweigh the negative. In my case they did not.

I too have seen a lot of people in upper management who shouldn’t be there. I wonder if this means that nobody really deserves the respect and power we show to upper management.

They’re just people like everyone else, subject to the same psychological failings as anyone.

Giving people a lot of power over other people might just be a recipe for disaster.

Of course I’ve met some compelling leaders and I’ve seen them replaced with total fools so maybe there are people who are better at it than others. (Eric Schmidt springs to mind as an example of the former and Sundar whatever his name is an example of the latter) Maybe it’s just hard to tell the difference. Or maybe our selection process is flawed.

That's really odd, because I remember asking someone who had interviewed a lot and she said that kind of question is almost worthless. Everyone is where they want to be, so of course they like working there. They have also achieved their position, so they think it is a great place to work.

The question comes from a self-selecting population.

I prefer to ask something like, “What’s one thing you love, and what’s one thing you’d change tomorrow if you could?”

Everybody would improve something, and it can give you insight into actual day-to-day challenges.

If they say, “Nothing,” either it’s the one rare perfect workplace or they are too afraid or checked out to give a real answer.

Either way it’s informative.

cafeteria is a safe answer there.

(sort of like: "my one weakness is I work TOO hard!")

Especially when WFH

Yeah, this is definitely a much better formulation and one I've used in more recent interviews.

> Everyone is where they want to be, so of course they like working there.

This reminds me of the joke where the economist sees the $100 bill on the ground and says if it were real, someone would have grabbed it already. It assumes that the market is perfectly efficient when it is not. There are tons of reasons why someone would work at one job when they would prefer another job:

Maybe the local job market is poor, but the worker can't move.

Maybe their spouse has a medical condition that requires really good health insurance, and moving to another job would lose that coverage.

Maybe the worker has been job-hopping too much and has to stay at this job for another year or whatever.

etc., etc.

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