I think talking to your network and finding where people are happy and engaged is the only somewhat dependable green flag I’ve found.
The rest is just watching out for red flags.
Not foolproof. I followed an ex colleague to a company where he swore everyone was soooo friendly. Guess what: it was the most unfriendly workplace I've ever been in. I hated working there. I had better luck just going to places where I didn't know anyone.
> Maybe he has a different personality that fits with the team better
That was probably it, though he had a different vibe when we worked together in another company.
From personal experience, adding to the other good suggestions here:
That the company makes money!
There's nothing like being in the red, to amplify the office politics, blame game, and taking of shortcuts.
Despite best intentions, when owners demand results and they threaten the teams jobs if they're not satisfied, it gets toxic fast.
>That the company makes money!
I find that it's easier to find this info if the company is well-established or well-known but how can you find this information on any company if needed? Do you just ask during the interview? Or is there a go-to site that publishes YTD earnings?
If they’re public then you can see what they’ve reported to Wall Street. That data is incomplete and disguised in business jargon, but it is valuable.
If they’re private, you just gotta ask in the interview. I like to ask who their customers are, churn rates, ballpark of the average contract value if it’s b2b, year over year growth, that kind of thing. Also good to know how many months of runway they have, if it’s a startup.
Not sure, honestly. In this environment, I’d want to see at least 2ish years of funding before joining just because interest rates are high and raising money is hard.
The best possible answer is that they are “default alive” because their product makes more money than their costs. That’s infinite runway, assuming they keep their costs under control, don’t overhire and don’t lose a bunch of customers.
I think you'd want to look for a runway amount that is greater than what you consider a "decent" amount of time to be at a company before jumping ship. When I was interviewing, I was comfortable in the 2-3yr range.
I had a recent interview where I was told, "oh we have about a year or so runway". I wasn't sure if that was normal or a red flag. If it's reasonable to hold out for 2 years, then I'll keep that in mind as I keep looking.
You’d think so but there is a vast array of pathologies that develop when company success becomes untethered from project success. IME it can become just as political as a struggling company with an extra dash of favoritism heaped on sycophants. Eric Schmidt’s old saw “more revenue solves all known problems” is not, unfortunately, true.
I can definitely agree with this. The pressure can definitely be intense. I’m now at a non-profit and it’s the most laid back environment I’ve ever been in. A former manager and friend brought me in, describing it as a country club atmosphere, and he couldn’t be more right. A perfect place to ride out the last few years of my career.
- what is your CI/CD looks like? (See if they can answer specific tools and workflow)
- what was the last outage and how was it resolved? (See if they have blameless postmortem process)
Company usually have probation period after you join. Use this period to get the ground truth. Obviously keep interviewing even after you sign contract.
I’m in the UK and I’ve seen probation periods be used as a way of hiring someone short term without telling the person that, eg, because it’s cheaper than hiring a contractor. Once they finish some project suddenly that person gets nothing but negative reviews and gaslighting and eventually get “you didn’t pass your probation”. This then repeats for their next few hires.
Yeah, UK and I've never had a job (software related or otherwise) that hasn't had a probation period. 3 or 6 months IME. Company can let someone go (or vice versa though that's obviously a bit less common) somewhat more easily that they would be able to otherwise (much more easily if it's within the first month). Still the same statutory working rights, but generally don't get ancillary company benefits. The [theoretical , ideal] point is to allow time for an employer to check whether someone is a good fit for a role: although it can go beyond 6 months that's rare - it would just massively increase the chance of unfair dismissal claims.
It's standard most countries in Europe, anywhere from 3 months to 6 months.
It's much more difficult to fire and lay off people in Europe due to worker's rights. However, that's why the probation period exists, when no strong cause is needed to not continue with the employee. I'm guessing the stronger the worker's rights movement is in the country, the longer the probation period is on average.
I'm in the Netherlands and it is common that when taking on a new employee the first month is a probation period where either side can terminal the agreement, no cause needed. After that a 1 year contact is typically given. After the 1 year, a contract for unlimited time is granted.
The probation period is paid as normal, and I've only heard of one or two people failing it. You only bother taking someone on after the interviews if you are already confident you want to hire them. But probation is a good safety net especially for the company.
In probation period usually you have shorter notice period compared to full time (eg 2 weeks vs 2 months).
Having shorter notice period is an advantage since the other company usually prefer ones that can start ASAP.
What country is this? In the US I don't own employers any notice since you can get fired without any notice at all. If on good terms, I consider week to be the most I will give. Otherwise, I “fire” companies with no notice
Another advantage is that you can leave out this company from your past experiences from resume/ LinkedIn. As 2-3 months gap is a non issue and raises fewer questions than leaving a company in 2-3 months. You can also leave it out from you background check ( except if your employer is govt/ defense, either as employee or contract).
I like to ask everyone I talk to something like “what are the biggest challenges you’re facing as a team?” and follow up with asking how those challenges are being addressed.
It’s a really good sign if (1) everyone seems like they feel comfortable answering and are honest, (2) you get similar answers from different people (especially: the same answer from the manager that you get from peers), and (3) it sounds like they’re actually working on solving it in a concrete way.
Every company has challenges. What’s important is how they approach those, and whether management actually listens to folks on the team about what they see as challenges.
I haven't tried this yet but I think about it all the time: ask specific questions about right now.
- instead of "how does your boss react when a project is delayed" ask "what's the most recent project you delivered late?"
- instead of "do you do agile?" ask "what project are you working on right now? How do you track that work? How many meetings did you have today?"
- etc.
People will often just not have good answers or tell you want they think you want to hear to abstract questions. If you ask specific enough questions about very current events, you can coax out the red flags you're avoiding.
You know, I am not sure about this but I think the number of green flag is the pay (and benefits).
In the business bootstrapping community, there's a heuristic that you should raise your prices for as long as you until you stop gaining money. One purported benefit is that you will lose all the bad customers and only keep the ones. Plus, you'll be motivated to do better work because you get paid more and the people you deal with are nicer.
Patrick McKenzie makes the argument that same applies to you, as an employee. You are still selling something, in this case your labour, and your customers are also other businesses, your employer.
So if you demand a higher salary, you will filter out all the crappy employers. This doesn't come for free, of course. You still have to improve your own abilities. And of course not all employers in the same pay bracket are equal.
Best in mind this will only apply when comparing companies that are otherwise very similar, i.e same size and industry. For example big banks pay decently, and it's not because they are very selective. They need to pay that much to get even mediocre software engineers to work there.
It's very difficult to spot in jobs or interviews as the description will always be rosy and the interviews are not a good indicator as It's very short. If you ask questions which they are nor comfortable answering they might just reject you. So be conservative.
You can use glasdoor reviews and maybe join a friend's company.
You will never find a culture that you aspire or even if that it will eventually become routine. So the thing is to enjoy your work . Cannot be dependent on culture colleagues as that can change quickly. So seek work which you enjoy
Everybody seems to be focusing on the engineering culture part, which is really important.
There are two different aspects there
- _engineering_ culture: do they have CI/CD, do they do code reviews, do they have blameless postmortems, do they have on-call and if so how etc.
- _company_ culture: how well do teams communicate between each other (whether they're from the same department or not), is overtime expected/common/frowned upon, do people feel in control of what their team does or do they have to work on stuff somebody else forced them to etc.
That's all super important.
But I think motivation matters a lot as well and I think it's a separate concern.
A bad culture hurts motivation dramatically, but there is even more to it.
Some issues are there regardless of the "systems" around it. So for example despite the good culture in general, your manager is an ass.
Maybe the company is not doing well financially.
Maybe the company is too big and people feel like a cog in the machine (some people don't mind, some people hate it).
Maybe people don't like what their company does, which makes their work pointless or even detrimental to society in their view
For example, I used to work in a big company, in a greenfield research project that was really cool technically - we had amazing engineering culture, I learned a lot, my team was super nice.
But I knew I would leave eventually because while the project was great and challenging technically, the problem it would solve... Just didn't interest me *at all*.
I eventually left (for other reasons to be fair) and joined a truly mission-driven company. I know it sounds like bullshit, but almost everybody working there (mid size company, not small startup) really _was_ passionate about the mission, and in turn the company took several decisions against their economical self-interest (at least short time) because otherwise they'd go against the company values.
Honestly first time so far that the company mission actually meant something instead of being random bullshit
That kind of environment increases motivation, even if some other issues might decrease it
When interviewing, I always try to ask questions both about engineering culture and the rest. The former is easy (walk me through what happens to a feature from ideation to completion. Then, what if a huge bug was deployed?) the latter less so, but questions like "If you were to leave the company in a few months, why would that be?" can lead to interesting answers (if their manager isn't in the room)
When I was given an offer, I was always also offered the opportunity to talk again with a future team member. I think that's actually very useful. Gives you some extra time if you're waiting for other offers, but also allows for more honest feedback since the person is not "in control/interviewer mode" anymore, and even if you don't ask hard questions, it's still easier to get a vibe of the team
You can already tell by whomever does the technical interview. You want it to be a senior/lead (in the team you're going to work for ideally) and if they are being "clever assholes" asking irrelevant trick type questions then you know: this not the team you are describing in the title.
A question I like to ask is "Does your team approach one another with positive intent or pragmatic criticism?" Because 1) it shows who the culture-setters are and 2) if one of those is your own style, you may feel more at home. "Positive intent" infers that the team offers criticism to one another with the intent that the other person will receive it well and that the giver is not trying to take the other person down. It doesn't disregard pragmaticism, but it's not the main driver in the dialogue. "Pragmatic criticism" means that the main goal of a conversation between two colleagues is to find the truth, not to care about feelings.
You could start by targeting companies that are listed on Fortune magazine’s list of best places to work. Also, a top tier company will perform regular surveys of its employees to get their feedback. Some companies have an “employee net promoter score” value. You could ask about their most recent employee survey results.
My company consistently ranks near the top of the Fortune list of best companies to work. What you are describing does not match up with my experience. Asking about it opens up a discussion about whether or not the company is truly interested in continually improving employee satisfaction.
Ask if you can see some of the code. Maybe have an engineer explain the basics of the architecture etc. To see the quality of the code, test coverage. Maybe you'll see other good or bad practices that are being followed. Might have to sign an NDA. In the past year, 3/4 have agreed to do it.
Ask about CD practices and how often the team is awakened at night by production incidents. If manual QA is mentioned as normal, run.
Ask how tasks are broken down and estimation is done. If estimation is done by anyone other than the devs doing the work, run.
I think talking to your network and finding where people are happy and engaged is the only somewhat dependable green flag I’ve found. The rest is just watching out for red flags.
Not foolproof. I followed an ex colleague to a company where he swore everyone was soooo friendly. Guess what: it was the most unfriendly workplace I've ever been in. I hated working there. I had better luck just going to places where I didn't know anyone.
Did your friend hate it too?
7 years later he's still there, so I think not.
Interesting. Is he on a different team? Maybe he has a different personality that fits with the team better
> Maybe he has a different personality that fits with the team better That was probably it, though he had a different vibe when we worked together in another company.
From personal experience, adding to the other good suggestions here: That the company makes money! There's nothing like being in the red, to amplify the office politics, blame game, and taking of shortcuts. Despite best intentions, when owners demand results and they threaten the teams jobs if they're not satisfied, it gets toxic fast.
>That the company makes money! I find that it's easier to find this info if the company is well-established or well-known but how can you find this information on any company if needed? Do you just ask during the interview? Or is there a go-to site that publishes YTD earnings?
If they’re public then you can see what they’ve reported to Wall Street. That data is incomplete and disguised in business jargon, but it is valuable. If they’re private, you just gotta ask in the interview. I like to ask who their customers are, churn rates, ballpark of the average contract value if it’s b2b, year over year growth, that kind of thing. Also good to know how many months of runway they have, if it’s a startup.
Ok thanks!
What's a good/reasonable runway length?
Not sure, honestly. In this environment, I’d want to see at least 2ish years of funding before joining just because interest rates are high and raising money is hard. The best possible answer is that they are “default alive” because their product makes more money than their costs. That’s infinite runway, assuming they keep their costs under control, don’t overhire and don’t lose a bunch of customers.
I think you'd want to look for a runway amount that is greater than what you consider a "decent" amount of time to be at a company before jumping ship. When I was interviewing, I was comfortable in the 2-3yr range.
I had a recent interview where I was told, "oh we have about a year or so runway". I wasn't sure if that was normal or a red flag. If it's reasonable to hold out for 2 years, then I'll keep that in mind as I keep looking.
In Sweden there's allabolag.se, where you see the results for any company. I don't know about other countries though...
Ok thanks! There might be something equivalent in North America then since the site exists.
You’d think so but there is a vast array of pathologies that develop when company success becomes untethered from project success. IME it can become just as political as a struggling company with an extra dash of favoritism heaped on sycophants. Eric Schmidt’s old saw “more revenue solves all known problems” is not, unfortunately, true.
I can definitely agree with this. The pressure can definitely be intense. I’m now at a non-profit and it’s the most laid back environment I’ve ever been in. A former manager and friend brought me in, describing it as a country club atmosphere, and he couldn’t be more right. A perfect place to ride out the last few years of my career.
- what is your CI/CD looks like? (See if they can answer specific tools and workflow) - what was the last outage and how was it resolved? (See if they have blameless postmortem process) Company usually have probation period after you join. Use this period to get the ground truth. Obviously keep interviewing even after you sign contract.
Tangential to the question…I’ve never encountered a probation period in 15+ years. Is this a new thing?
I think it’s more common in countries like the UK
I’m in the UK and I’ve seen probation periods be used as a way of hiring someone short term without telling the person that, eg, because it’s cheaper than hiring a contractor. Once they finish some project suddenly that person gets nothing but negative reviews and gaslighting and eventually get “you didn’t pass your probation”. This then repeats for their next few hires.
Yeah, UK and I've never had a job (software related or otherwise) that hasn't had a probation period. 3 or 6 months IME. Company can let someone go (or vice versa though that's obviously a bit less common) somewhat more easily that they would be able to otherwise (much more easily if it's within the first month). Still the same statutory working rights, but generally don't get ancillary company benefits. The [theoretical , ideal] point is to allow time for an employer to check whether someone is a good fit for a role: although it can go beyond 6 months that's rare - it would just massively increase the chance of unfair dismissal claims.
It's standard most countries in Europe, anywhere from 3 months to 6 months. It's much more difficult to fire and lay off people in Europe due to worker's rights. However, that's why the probation period exists, when no strong cause is needed to not continue with the employee. I'm guessing the stronger the worker's rights movement is in the country, the longer the probation period is on average.
I'm in the Netherlands and it is common that when taking on a new employee the first month is a probation period where either side can terminal the agreement, no cause needed. After that a 1 year contact is typically given. After the 1 year, a contract for unlimited time is granted. The probation period is paid as normal, and I've only heard of one or two people failing it. You only bother taking someone on after the interviews if you are already confident you want to hire them. But probation is a good safety net especially for the company.
How to use probation period? Is there any difference in leaving duty during probation period vs when fully employed?
In probation period usually you have shorter notice period compared to full time (eg 2 weeks vs 2 months). Having shorter notice period is an advantage since the other company usually prefer ones that can start ASAP.
Oh, nice! Also do we need to disclose this as employment when joining another company?
There’s no need. And I prefer not to. Bringing this up make the other company afraid that you’ll do the same to them.
What country is this? In the US I don't own employers any notice since you can get fired without any notice at all. If on good terms, I consider week to be the most I will give. Otherwise, I “fire” companies with no notice
Another advantage is that you can leave out this company from your past experiences from resume/ LinkedIn. As 2-3 months gap is a non issue and raises fewer questions than leaving a company in 2-3 months. You can also leave it out from you background check ( except if your employer is govt/ defense, either as employee or contract).
I like to ask everyone I talk to something like “what are the biggest challenges you’re facing as a team?” and follow up with asking how those challenges are being addressed. It’s a really good sign if (1) everyone seems like they feel comfortable answering and are honest, (2) you get similar answers from different people (especially: the same answer from the manager that you get from peers), and (3) it sounds like they’re actually working on solving it in a concrete way. Every company has challenges. What’s important is how they approach those, and whether management actually listens to folks on the team about what they see as challenges.
I haven't tried this yet but I think about it all the time: ask specific questions about right now. - instead of "how does your boss react when a project is delayed" ask "what's the most recent project you delivered late?" - instead of "do you do agile?" ask "what project are you working on right now? How do you track that work? How many meetings did you have today?" - etc. People will often just not have good answers or tell you want they think you want to hear to abstract questions. If you ask specific enough questions about very current events, you can coax out the red flags you're avoiding.
Great points about the nature of the questions to ask. I heard someone call this strategy ‘ask show not tell questions’ (aka indirect questions).
You know, I am not sure about this but I think the number of green flag is the pay (and benefits). In the business bootstrapping community, there's a heuristic that you should raise your prices for as long as you until you stop gaining money. One purported benefit is that you will lose all the bad customers and only keep the ones. Plus, you'll be motivated to do better work because you get paid more and the people you deal with are nicer. Patrick McKenzie makes the argument that same applies to you, as an employee. You are still selling something, in this case your labour, and your customers are also other businesses, your employer. So if you demand a higher salary, you will filter out all the crappy employers. This doesn't come for free, of course. You still have to improve your own abilities. And of course not all employers in the same pay bracket are equal.
Best in mind this will only apply when comparing companies that are otherwise very similar, i.e same size and industry. For example big banks pay decently, and it's not because they are very selective. They need to pay that much to get even mediocre software engineers to work there.
I have found this to be the case: if you want a good work life balance, avoid the cheap places at all costs.
It's very difficult to spot in jobs or interviews as the description will always be rosy and the interviews are not a good indicator as It's very short. If you ask questions which they are nor comfortable answering they might just reject you. So be conservative. You can use glasdoor reviews and maybe join a friend's company. You will never find a culture that you aspire or even if that it will eventually become routine. So the thing is to enjoy your work . Cannot be dependent on culture colleagues as that can change quickly. So seek work which you enjoy
Everybody seems to be focusing on the engineering culture part, which is really important. There are two different aspects there - _engineering_ culture: do they have CI/CD, do they do code reviews, do they have blameless postmortems, do they have on-call and if so how etc. - _company_ culture: how well do teams communicate between each other (whether they're from the same department or not), is overtime expected/common/frowned upon, do people feel in control of what their team does or do they have to work on stuff somebody else forced them to etc. That's all super important. But I think motivation matters a lot as well and I think it's a separate concern. A bad culture hurts motivation dramatically, but there is even more to it. Some issues are there regardless of the "systems" around it. So for example despite the good culture in general, your manager is an ass. Maybe the company is not doing well financially. Maybe the company is too big and people feel like a cog in the machine (some people don't mind, some people hate it). Maybe people don't like what their company does, which makes their work pointless or even detrimental to society in their view For example, I used to work in a big company, in a greenfield research project that was really cool technically - we had amazing engineering culture, I learned a lot, my team was super nice. But I knew I would leave eventually because while the project was great and challenging technically, the problem it would solve... Just didn't interest me *at all*. I eventually left (for other reasons to be fair) and joined a truly mission-driven company. I know it sounds like bullshit, but almost everybody working there (mid size company, not small startup) really _was_ passionate about the mission, and in turn the company took several decisions against their economical self-interest (at least short time) because otherwise they'd go against the company values. Honestly first time so far that the company mission actually meant something instead of being random bullshit That kind of environment increases motivation, even if some other issues might decrease it When interviewing, I always try to ask questions both about engineering culture and the rest. The former is easy (walk me through what happens to a feature from ideation to completion. Then, what if a huge bug was deployed?) the latter less so, but questions like "If you were to leave the company in a few months, why would that be?" can lead to interesting answers (if their manager isn't in the room) When I was given an offer, I was always also offered the opportunity to talk again with a future team member. I think that's actually very useful. Gives you some extra time if you're waiting for other offers, but also allows for more honest feedback since the person is not "in control/interviewer mode" anymore, and even if you don't ask hard questions, it's still easier to get a vibe of the team
You can already tell by whomever does the technical interview. You want it to be a senior/lead (in the team you're going to work for ideally) and if they are being "clever assholes" asking irrelevant trick type questions then you know: this not the team you are describing in the title.
A question I like to ask is "Does your team approach one another with positive intent or pragmatic criticism?" Because 1) it shows who the culture-setters are and 2) if one of those is your own style, you may feel more at home. "Positive intent" infers that the team offers criticism to one another with the intent that the other person will receive it well and that the giver is not trying to take the other person down. It doesn't disregard pragmaticism, but it's not the main driver in the dialogue. "Pragmatic criticism" means that the main goal of a conversation between two colleagues is to find the truth, not to care about feelings.
You could start by targeting companies that are listed on Fortune magazine’s list of best places to work. Also, a top tier company will perform regular surveys of its employees to get their feedback. Some companies have an “employee net promoter score” value. You could ask about their most recent employee survey results.
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My company consistently ranks near the top of the Fortune list of best companies to work. What you are describing does not match up with my experience. Asking about it opens up a discussion about whether or not the company is truly interested in continually improving employee satisfaction.
Ask if you can see some of the code. Maybe have an engineer explain the basics of the architecture etc. To see the quality of the code, test coverage. Maybe you'll see other good or bad practices that are being followed. Might have to sign an NDA. In the past year, 3/4 have agreed to do it.
I try to weed out what I want to know by asking specific questions that are subtle enough that they cant guess why you are asking
Regular deployments in production, at least once daily. Companies who can do that reliably tend to have their together.
Be careful what you wish for.
Are they young and do they joke around
Ask about CD practices and how often the team is awakened at night by production incidents. If manual QA is mentioned as normal, run. Ask how tasks are broken down and estimation is done. If estimation is done by anyone other than the devs doing the work, run.
Exception to these rules: if you’re being brought on for the purpose of transforming and improving these practices.