| Senior Manager here who build up a career from being dev at agencies to overseeing 500 devs at a global large company. All is speculation. Culture is a term that has no meaning. There are niches for everything everywhere. We are all on a spectrum. If AI and ML reminded us of anything, than it is that there is always a spectrum. The only question is, whether you are willing to take risks or not. If you have a boss, you live by his mercy. Bosses change, circumstances do as well, team members do, workspace and subjects to work on. All not in your control. I think of my pay check in terms of punitive damage to a certain extent. High enough to stay? High enough to find out? If you have a somewhat plan b worrying about culture becomes meaningless. I saw it many times, there are no predictors. Slow processes? Fantastic people bound to decisions. Friendly encouraging folks wanting you? Crazy sociopath who forget about you, once lured in. Fantastic tech stack? Yeah, at the beginning. So what do you do? Professional attitude that honeymoon means nothing. Money and options do. There might be one exception that I used and that was bluntness. I told people that I look for people who care about professionalism. I told them, about what we are really doing, how our tech stack came to be and is managed over time. What our career model really is. Nothing shiny 24/7/365, but great devs with challenging technical objectives looking for similar people or others who want to have a more relaxed supportive function. Nothing wrong here. I quite talked them out of the job so to say. Addressing mistakes and how you cope with them might be the only helpful predictor I am looking for. |
That said, the right tradeoffs can make it totally worth it. I think I joined one by accident, personally, but I feel that I have the best people, career growth and tech here (always wanted to do some networking work), so it still feels right to me.