[throwaway98797]

kinda silly given the ability of most people to infer anything substantial through finances and marketing copy

really company reviews is all that matters and even that has limited value since your life is determined by your manger

best you can do is sus out how your interviewers are fairing

are they happy? are they stressed, everything else has so much noise to be worse than worthless

[GrumpyYoungMan]

"Is the company consistently profitable or not?" and "Are revenue and profits growing over time, stable, or declining?" are very important questions to answer, particularly if stock grants are part of the compensation package.

For developers who work on products, getting a sense of whether the product of the team you'd be joining is a core part of the business versus speculative (i.e. stable vs likely to have layoffs) and how successful the product is in the marketplace (teams for products that are failing also are likely to be victims of layoffs) are also very important to understand.

[nunez]

So many ways to juice those numbers though.

And if your team is far from the money, what often matters much much more is how much political capital your skip level manager has and to what extent it can be deployed when the company needs to re-org or cut. Shoot, this can matter even if you're close to the money (if you're joining a team that's in the critical path of the profit center vs a capex moonshot project funded by said profit center).

This is one thing I really like about sales engineering. Sales orgs carry (relatively) very low-BS politically.

[nradov]

It matters a lot whether the organization is growing. If you get assigned to a toxic manager in a static organization then you're likely to be stuck there indefinitely. In a growing organization there will be opportunities to move up and out to other internal teams.