[jcadam]

Tech companies have either a sales culture or an engineering culture. As a new employee, you usually figure out which your new company has by the end of the first day.

A lot of companies start with an engineering culture and transition out of it as they grow (actually, this is almost always the case) - examples: HP, Boeing, et al.

[paulcole]

> Tech companies have either a sales culture or an engineering culture. As a new employee, you usually figure out which your new company has by the end of the first day.

Why wait until the end of your first day? This is a great question to ask in an interview.

[sithlord]

I think the show Silicon Valley does a good job of portraying that transition.

[deepsquirrelnet]

This is my experience exactly. A few years ago, I joined a startup at 50 people that was very much an engineering culture. By the time we hit ~120 people it shifted into a sales culture due to pressure from our investors.

Sales people had complete free reign to promise everything under the sun to potential customers. It caused a lot of havoc in our product development and burned out most of the engineers pretty quickly.