Seems like with the hot market for decent technical folks, we could be a bit more up-front during interviews and maybe the smarter companies will start to get the message that work-life balance really does matter.
Seems like with the hot market for decent technical folks, we could be a bit more up-front during interviews and maybe the smarter companies will start to get the message that work-life balance really does matter.
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Good to hear how that went. That’s definitely one of my personal priorities, and I have to say I haven’t known how to talk about it in interviews.
Hours are a great topic for detecting sucker culture. It’s one thing when people occasionally have to work long hours. When people are proud of working long hours, or programmers have to carry pagers on a regular basis, that’s bad.
Getting a sense of the story around remote work is also important. I wouldn’t advise working from home often when you’re new to a job, but companies that disallow remote work, especially if they use open-plan offices, are best avoided. Forcing someone to work in an open-plan office betrays the attitude that people have to be intimidated into getting work done.
“Agile” and Scrum are also bad signs. Workplace politics, as often played, is zero- or negative-sum. Those practices wouldn’t be in place if they didn’t have losers as well as winners… and often the political losers are the best people.
Of course, the biggest sign of sucker culture is low salary, typically offset with laughable equity packages. If you’re taking a worse deal than the VCs to get that equity (and you probably are, because not only are you going down in present salary, but also in future raises and bonuses and, quite likely, in the quality of work you’ll get if it costs less to waste your time) then you should just pass on that job, unless you’re desperate.