Comment by magic_beans | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magic_beans | Hacker News Reader

Here are the five things I look out for when evaluating a new position:

1. Is the salary enough to pay my rent, feed me, and allow me to save a little bit every month? (This one is obvious. Don't take a job that will put you in debt!!!)

2. Do I trust that my direct manager will protect me from bullshit? (This is a REALLY important one for me, and is the reason I've rejected offers. If your future manager is an asshole or treats you like shit during the interview, don't take the job. A good manager exists to make sure you do the best work you can possibly do for the company, and gives you any resources you might need for that. A good manager is your leader, not your enemy.)

3. Will I be able to learn and grow in this role? (A good manager will help immensely with this one.)

4. Do I like the people I will be working with? (If you don't at least tolerate the people you work with on a daily basis, you're going to be miserable).

5. Is my commute within reason?

(I'm a programmer so my personal rules reflect that)

I like these guidelines.

For salary, my rule is "does the offered salary meet local norms for the position and the company's situation, and does it show respect for me and for the role I will be playing?" I wouldn't be applying for the job if "norms" for the job would not meet my needs (and, as another replier points out, leave more than a little after expenses to plan for the future).

Also, I look hard at the working conditions and environment. I don't really start talking about this stuff until after an offer, but I'm watching for signs throughout the process:

* Are the hours humane? Overworking programmers is a sign of disrespect for the role.

* Is it friendly to women? An engineering team with no women is a huge red flag of bad management and culture, for teams of more than about 5 people. For smaller teams, is there a sense that hiring women is important?

* Does the company try to dominate the employee's non-working life? Regular "happy hours", catered dinner at night (RED FLAG), bar/keggerator in the office... all bad signs to me

* Is there flexibility about when and where the work gets done, or is it ass-in-a-seat-9-to-7?

* Do people stick around? Has my manager pulled in people he/she has worked with in the past (big plus)?

> Does the company try to dominate the employee's non-working life? Regular "happy hours", catered dinner at night (RED FLAG), bar/keggerator in the office... all bad signs to me.

That's one of the biggest red flags for me, both for work-life balance and what the company is spending money on. If they have all sorts of fancy toys around the office I'm not sure I can trust that they are spending their money wisely.

When I graduated from college and was applying for literally everything, I started a list of companies who had pictures of ping-pong tables in their job postings. They always appeared to be included as proof that the company was 'fun'.

Call me cynical, but I think those "perks" exist purely for marketing purposes. The greatest expense of a ping-pong table is almost certainly the space it takes up in the office, and overall I'd say it's a relatively inexpensive marketing tactic, and it's definitely a cheap line item when it comes to employee perks as well.

The biggest issue with ping pong, and similar games (bubble hockey, foosball, bags), is that if you need a break, you will need to find someone else to take it with you. Furthermore, you are basically broadcasting to the entire workplace that you aren't working at the moment, which is disruptive even if they break is well-deserved.

I worked at a place that had something like that, and I literally never saw anyone playing it.

Had a ping pong table at the old office, can confirm was never used.

The foosball table at my last place of work definitely saw use. It was away from work areas, mind you.

>Is it friendly to women? An engineering team with no women is a huge red flag of bad management and culture, for teams of more than about 5 people. For smaller teams, is there a sense that hiring women is important?

Personally, I'd rather a team that hires based on meritocracy than gender.

Me too, yet I'm surrounded by middling young white men who went to top tier US colleges.

In case you aren't just trolling:

A lack of meritocracy causing of a lack of female engineers is ignorant.

There are plenty of meritorious but under-represented populations; especially female engineers. A culture without enough women or without a plan to hire women is a red flag. Surrounding yourself with people that support [your] unsubstantiated biases increases the likelihood that the culture is unhealthy.

What about other men-dominated (thus sexist), well-paying industries?

Are you also concerned about the lack of female plumbers? Construction workers? Miners, perhaps?

I don't interact with those industries regularly, so neither am I confronted with their gross gender inequality nor can I encourage their employers to do better at attracting female applicants.

For dev jobs, both the problem visibility and remedial actions are obvious to me.

To answer your question: yes

I don't plan on being one of those, so it's rather abstract.

Construction work, plumbing and mining (for workers) are not well paying industry when compared to software.

Also, these industries are male dominated because they require hard labour and working conditions, which is often biologically unsuitable for women. Even then, in South Asian countries you can find even ratio females to males in construction work. They do the same hard labour as men, and as the use of machinery and automation is rarer (in these regions), it's even more manual hard labour.

A culture without enough [any underrepresented group] or without a plan to hire [underrepresented group] is a red flag.

Do you evaluate potential workplaces based on the number of hispanics, blacks, Australians, Irish, Jews and Muslims as well?

I don't believe the parent is saying to hire on gender rather than meritocracy; I believe they are pointing out that 1) Women ARE a certain portion of good devs, so a true meritocracy would have some women (beyond an org of a certain size, of course) If a company of sufficient size has NO women devs, then something is likely off, whether in discouraging applicants, turning good applicants away, or causing people to leave. 2) Even the concept of meritocracy is complex, and success of the team, not just the individual, is worth something. For instance, at a consultancy(actually this probably holds true to some amount everywhere), there's a lot more to having a successful project than just how fast or accurately you code the algorithm (though of course, you have to be able to do that as a baseline). How well you present, how well you listen, how well you understand the client's needs, how well you can explain things, or mentor your fellow developers, or see around corners... Having a diverse team can contribute least a little value in these sort of non-code things that lead a project to overall success, rather than executing wonderfully right off a cliff. It's a factor to consider, among many, when hiring.

This.

A large company without females at all would be quite suspicious, to say the least.

So are you saying that there are so few good women in tech as to be < 20% of the pool out there? And that's across all the people you'd need to staff a team of 5 (so could include things like QA and UX).

Because on the one hand I agree with the sentiment, but I also agree with the original statement that having a decent sized team without women is a red flag. Every place I've worked, even if in development there were few women (due to, yes, it being hard to find them), there were plenty as product owners, as QA, or as UX. Whereas the one place I can think of that I worked that only had one at the time I joined (the marketing person, for a small startup of 20 people), it was quite toxic and unwelcoming when they later added a female UX.

I'm really happy to see commute time in your list (among the other points). I'm a big believer in increasing quality of life by decreasing commute time, something which is increasingly difficult in the largest metropolitan job centers of America.

Re #2, couldn't agree more. I was 10 years into my career before I understood the value and purpose of manager as "Enabler", protecting me from unnecessary BS and giving me the tools/opportunity to do my job; majority of my colleagues still only see managers as either productive "team leads / designers", or useless - giving them no other value outside of their technical contributions.

This is a great way to look at it. Few things I'd add: 6. Does the CEO have a strong vision and character? Roughly, are they more like Elon Musk (engineering driven, moves quickly), Jeff Bezos (long term thinker, experiments a lot), Mark Beinoff (business savvy, sales driven) or Travis Kalanick (win at all costs). No matter what companies say, their culture is determined by the CEO - their values, motivations, personality. This is important for startups.

7. What excites the people working there? (the people you interviewed with). Is it passion for company mission? Great colleagues? Big investors / lots of money raised (red flag)? Frat culture? (specific schools or groups) (red flag).

I like these (I am 2 years out of college, so my experience might be completely different)

On 2,3 and 4. Some companies have anonymous interview procedures where your manager or team mates might not be the people interviewing you (more so if you are straight out of college).

My addition for new grads: I would incline towards companies with tough interviews(comparatively), probability of smarter colleagues and high expectations. I might be totally wrong, after all I have been in the industry for only two years.

This would basically be my list as well, with a strong emphasis on #2.

I go further on #2 and ask myself, "Do I want to work for this person?" (in terms of character, trust, will he/she have my back, do they care about my growth, etc.) and "Will I learn a lot from this person?" (skills, experience, industry knowledge, etc.)

Just save a "little" bit? you should be aiming for 1k savings per month

What about for positions not in the Bay Area bubble?

Does that not apply to all major metropolitan areas?

No, not every major city pays devs living expenses + $1,000/month.

Well I was managing about £1500k/month into my ISA last year central London.

That's grand pal.

Obviously this is relative to your location

I think "save 10%" is the rule-of-thumb and a more inclusive way to state it.

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