[KingOfCoders]

I think you can see the culture of a company already in how they deal with you. How they answer mails, how long you have to wait for answers, how bureaucratic they are, how they negotiate the contract etc. If nothing is possible to change in the contract, then there is nothing to change inside the company either.

There are not two companies, the recruiting-company and the working-company.

The way they deal with you as a candidate, they deal with you as an employee.

[gorbachev]

I don't know about that. In a larger company the "candidate experience" is driven by the HR organization. They have nothing to do with day-to-day stuff you do if you're hired. Their job is to sell the company to qualified candidates. They are going to put on a show, be exceedingly accommodating, etc. (that is, if they're good at their jobs).

Also the bigger the company, the more differences there are from team to team. Maybe there's a strong overall company culture, but with large companies they operate mostly at, sort of, guidelines level. Teams, and the people in them, have more of an impact to everyone's every day life.

That being said, I think you're right if the recruiting process is full of problems, that is probably a sign there are problems at the company. Could also be that your recruiter had a bad day.

[pdimitar]

> Could also be that your recruiter had a bad day.

As a fellow human being I can completely understand but I'd urge them to reschedule the interview if that's the case. Being an HR should be a super responsible job and they should always be at their best because their half-arsed decisions affect the lives of people on a regular basis.

[politelemon]

> There are not two companies, the recruiting-company and the working-company.

Oftentimes there are two departments sufficiently distant from each other that there are effectively two companies. The HR portion is distant from actual employees and cares very little for culture.

[gedy]

That's true, but.. those companies trend towards HR throwing unqualified candidates towards the interviewers, which effects culture by forcing "gotta prove you aren't an idiot or faker!" style interviewing, and hence the people you hire tend to be the the people willing to jump through those silly hoops. The best people I know are not.

[dml2135]

okay but… this is still a symptom of the company culture

[neilv]

There's a lot of truth to that. However, I think a significant number of pragmatically good situations can happen when some corporate processes are poor, but the team you'll be working on is great, and your superior shields you to a large degree from corporate.

One of the ways this happens is just that you have, say, a mixed engineering department, but your manager happens to be great. Another way is that a company got good engineering talent and culture in its formative years, and carries on, but the business or corporate side evolved distinctly.

Note that in some companies this might mean that you're only one great manager quitting away from being exposed to a ruthless corporate culture grown by stack-ranking Hunger Games and deadly-sharp elbows.

Or it could mean that your team's brilliant product design and solid engineering end up having the market opportunity ball dropped by the dysfunction of others just going through the motions. And maybe you should've suspected that, based on hints during the hiring process.

[datavirtue]

Ok...but managers last about as long in a position as a head of lettuce.

[neilv]

So store your manager with paper towels, changed frequently, to help them last longer.

[datavirtue]

I have had better results by shredding and bagging them.

[pdimitar]

I have lost count of the times when a decent company lost fantastic candidates because the HR people (from another company) that were supposed to funnel them to the actual company were clueless tourists.

Some girl that I am not sure has passed 22 years old and reading questions (slowly and carefully) from a script is making decisions affecting the lives of people times smarter and working harder than her, routinely, on dozens of thousands of places out there, even now.

I am disgusted by the state of the industry. If that's the best that most of humanity can do then I am not impressed to say the least. "Sub-optimal" does not even begin to describe it.