| I want to preface this by saying I would strongly heed the advice of version_five. All of the most toxic work places I've been at had cheerleaders that would tell you it was amazing. I have struggled with this issue for years and my approach was to build some heuristics based on where I've been happiest. I fundamentally believe the job landscape now for developers is just systemically worse than it was a decade ago, but these are things I've learned: - Are you treated with respect throughout the interview. All the companies I've been happiest at had interviews that were basically extended conversations (even if they had coding challenges). I always felt comfortable and respected, different answers than expected where treated with curiosity rather than skepticism. Above all else you need to honestly ask "are these people I want to work with everyday"? - B2B targeting larger customers tends to be much better than direct to consumer. Every "customer focused" team I've worked with is ultimately driven by a single moronic KPI, and ends up spending all of their energy trying to cheat users while convincing themselves that this is really good work. Large B2B contracts last for years and have a lot of revenue associated with them so there more room for thoughtful product development. - How important is engineering as you climb the ladder? Is technical leadership (especially above you) really technical? Are they the kind of people that still like hacking on projects, solving technical problems? At my happiest companies technical competence continues up the ladder as far as it can. Your direct manager should be someone that hacking on an unsolved problem with would be fun. - How financially healthy is the company? This doesn't mean "do they have a lot of funding", in my experience funding without fundamentals leads to weird behavior product wise as teams rush to please investors and come up with ways to survive. If investors and leadership and genuinely happy with the company there is a lot less pressure to do strange product things. - I used to think smaller companies were my favorite, but have found that a good small team in a large company can be just as good if not better. After several runs at some of the worst companies in my career I also felt it was impossible to find anything that was enjoyable. I'm currently at a place (that I won't name) where I finally enjoy going to work again, and feel no interest in dusting off my resume anytime soon. This above rules helped a lot with that. |
These two statements made me realize the premise of this thread is flawed. Thanks for saving me some time.
> I fundamentally believe the job landscape now for developers is just systemically worse than it was a decade ago
I have this hunch as well. I tend to think it's because of proprietary monopoly platforms like iOS, AWS, etc forcing bad habits on everyone. Everything is so noisy these days.