[atmz]

It's not this way everywhere! At my (mid-sized, public, SF-based) workplace, I work 8 hours/day, good postmortems, and understanding at all levels of the importance of work-life balance and how oncall (a sad inevitability) should work.

If your employer doesn't do this, move on - that's how things change.

[cbanek]

That sounds pretty sweet. I'd love to know where that is, if you don't mind sharing.

The problem about the "moving on" from bad workplaces is that it's hard to tell if your next workplace is going to be the same, even looking at reviews, like Glassdoor. Plus you're taking a fairly big risk to move to a new job. There's a lot of bait-and-switch type things going on, both in terms of role and culture.

For example, in one job I worked at, I hired on as an embedded engineer, but then I ended up writing a big data solution (and did nothing embedded).

In terms of culture it's very unlikely you'll meet the toxic members of the group, or be exposed to any of the politics during the interview. People will be on their best behavior, not their normal behavior. I have found that asking straightforward questions and trying to use my Bene Gesserit powers of truthsaying to see if they're putting me on has a pretty good S/N ratio. Also looking for that tired/sad/dejected/depressed look of random people in the hallways.

[bonniemuffin]

Now that I'm somewhat established in my career, I don't think I'd ever accept a job offer without a personal referral-- someone I know well who works at the company and can vouch for its culture. I don't think you can judge a company's culture from an interview; as you say, it's easy for them to be on their best behavior during an interview.

I'm sorry your experience has been so bad-- it's really not that bad everywhere!

[atmz]

https://www.yelp.com/careers/home (let me know if you want to chat)

And yeah, especially as you gain more experience/skills/system knowledge, moving on gets hard. Culture especially is interesting, as often there's tradeoffs between culture and role and interesting problems to solve.

[cbanek]

Thanks - that's a good datapoint.

> Culture especially is interesting, as often there's tradeoffs between culture and role and interesting problems to solve.

100% true in my experience. For interesting problems, there's always an endless list of applicants, which almost allows for those companies to abuse their employees. Same for the game industry.