[michaelochurch]

If you bail on every company that's dysfunctional and political (that's about 90%, including of startups) you'll probably get stuck with the job-hopper stigma before you find a good company.

Employers get away with horrible conditions and general dysfunction because of the job hopper stigma, but unfortunately, one person leaving bad situations immediately (instead of wasting months to years trying to make lemonade out of piss-lemons) is not going to break that stigma. In fact, it's going to lower your value and make you more likely to end up in dysfunctional companies.

A better strategy is to play the game, well, by learning how to do enough in typical, semi-dysfunctional environments to get career credit, while keeping an eye out for better opportunities. This all-or-nothing attitude that many young people have toward corporations ("if they think that way, then I don't want to work for those losers anyway") doesn't pan out in the real world. Even the good companies have plenty of stupid, political people in them.

[vinceguidry]

The answer to "job-hopper stigma" and any and all other competence-trigger hurdles is simple. Sell the benefit, not the feature.

In other words, change the conversation from "who you are" to "what you can do for them". A track record of accomplishments does a lot more to convince a stake-holder that you know what you're doing than a list of previously-held positions. If all you have is a list of previously-held positions, then sure, if there's more entries on it than years, you'll have a rough go at it. But you don't have to operate this way.

Nobody is unemployable. There are only people who have figured out how to convey competence and people who haven't.

[aaronem]

Well. Conveying competence is, indeed, a valuable skill. But the most it can do for you is to get you a seat at the table. What will you do once you've got the job, and it comes time to play the game?

And, while we're at it, why assume that the only possible reward for playing the game is the opportunity to keep playing the game? Isn't it possible that, in playing the game with sufficient skill and artistry, you can create for yourself the opportunity to do the work you joined that company to do?

...to be honest, I really don't know the answer to that last question at all. But it sure is an interesting question, don't you think?

[vinceguidry]

> What will you do once you've got the job,

Do your job? I'm having trouble understanding what you're getting at. If you don't like your work environment, then leave. Just don't take six months to figure that out. But really, you should know whether you would like working there before you take the job. It's not that hard to take a few of their current employees out for coffee and ask them what it's like to work there.

Not every job has the insane level of politicking described. Just find a place where you fit in. It exists.

[baldfat]

> really, you should know whether you would like working there before you take the job.

My worst work place had an extreme micro-manager of a president. People were fired after working there 15 years on the spot and others their department was under performing for years and years never were let go.

Final straw: Unannounced layoff of 10%. They fired people at their desk all morning and afternoon and did not have an all company meeting till 3:30 pm. The bonus the job had a loop hole and didn't have to pay unemployment tax. So everyone didn't know they did not qualify for unemployment and were left with 2 weeks severance pay and found out they didn't qualify many weeks later after they were denied their unemployment.

Should have known: This was a place I knew intimately for 5+ years. I was friends with most of the staff. I did have coffee with half a dozen people and well made a 10+ year commitment mentally before taking the job left 6 months afterwards on my 4th year of employment. Now I LOVE my job working for Head Start.

[aaronem]

Hardly an "insane level of politicking", as you like to put it; in a relatively close parallel early in my career, I cost my contracting firm a moderately lucrative client, and verged closely upon getting us sued, out of the same sort of sheer ignorance, as applied to vulnerability reporting rather than feature improvement.

I mean, sure, it would (possibly) be ideal if everyone in our field simply looked at the technical aspects of everything, without any personal or emotional investment whatsoever. What about your experience on this planet has given you to imagine that it's reasonable to expect any aspect of human life, singly or in the large, to be anywhere near ideal?

[GNUgler]

I disagree. I work at Google, and I can't imagine getting in trouble for making an unambiguous improvement to someone's code.

There is, of course, some politics. It's just not at the level where people could openly be pissed off just because someone made them look bad by doing better. Politics happens over much more ambiguous things, like what length people from one team should go to to fix bugs affecting another team. These are areas where there are legitimate differences of opinion, so it's only natural that people's biases affect their work.

[rdl]

Virtually all startups are dysfunctional in a variety of new and surprising ways, but I think you can clearly identify the main dysfunctions (or at least, things which won't be addressed) in 50-500 person companies, and figure out how much you care about those factors.

[tuxguy]

this ! awesome articulation bud !