| I'm presuming you want a candid, honest response as opposed to a look-how-inclusive-I-am one, hence the throwaway, so here's what I think you should be asking: 1. How frequently and for what reasons do people there work unpaid overtime? Does management plan it formally (e.g. "crunch time") or is it limited to emergencies like hacking attempts or vendor outages? Does this company think that asking people to put in 'extra effort' is a failure of management, or a regrettable but necessary part of doing business? 2. What's the policy on conferences? If they say they support them and send people, ask if at least half the team has been to one (with travel and lodging paid) in the last year or two. 3. How do they support professional development? You're not looking for little stuff like "we pay for Pluralsight!", you're looking for things like hackathons, paid time for professional development, a formal mentorship program, a developer book club, or other evidence of a genuine culture of improvement within the dev teams. 4. How much freedom do the dev teams have to choose their own stack and tools? If they currently use React, did a Director choose it or did the devs who had to build the UI choose it? If a dev team wanted to experiment with something (e.g. TDD, or pairing/mobbing, or switching from sprints to scrumban), could they just do it and see how it goes? Or would they need their boss's boss's signature first? You may notice there's nothing on that list about gender, race, diversity, etc. I put it to you that: a) Diversity is no indicator that you will not be underpaid, mistreated, lied to, etc b) Few teams will be able to give satisfactory answers to all of those questions c) Of those teams that can give good answers to all four questions, the proportion that suffer from a miasma of gender/race/etc toxicity will be approximately zero That said, "good team culture" is extremely subjective, and people here can't tell you how to find a company you'll like any more than we can tell you how to find a bar you'll like. You should figure out what you value (e.g. interuption-free focus time vs. frequent informal collaboration, remote distributed team vs. everyone-is-in-the-same-room, "bust ass to get rich" startup vs "eveyone leaves at 5pm" established company, etc) and treat those as just as important as the four questions I listed. Best of luck in your search. |
Actually it really is. Minorities tend to have higher bars against that kind of crap compared to the Tech Brogrammer Majority(tm).