
Ask HN: What are the other companies you'll never work for? - eric_khun
What are the companies you should absolutely avoid?<p>Why? Culture? CEO? Management? Customers?
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Japhy_Ryder
Brightcove. Completely terrible company - some of the most cliquey, horrible
people I've ever had the displeasure of working with.

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2rsf
CEO and culture will make me do better homework before and during the
interview process, but will not stop me from working for such a company.

I would avoid everything related to betting, I can't justify to myself abusing
people's weaknesses. There are grey areas like esports involving money

I would have to think twice about companies or teams building "content
recommendation", online ads or anything else that spies on individuals for the
soul purpose of making more money

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codingdave
I can give the same answer here that I give to recruiters. The job I do has to
improve the world somehow. It doesn't have to be some profound world-changing
project, but it has to be a net positive. For example, the project I've been
on for the last 7 years moves paper-based processes in small government to
online processes. Less waste, saves them money. Doesn't solve the big problems
of the world, but at least is one small positive step.

I will consider any job that can make that same claim. And I'll reject jobs
that cannot.

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mstaoru
My personal opinion on what I would avoid:

\- FAANG / BAT: too large, I don't want to tell people that my work was
handling validation of 17th form in Adwords extended preferences screen for
Tier-3 partners;

\- any kind of surveillance / anti-privacy tech, including all those "we help
companies understand their employees better" and "we make workers more
productive" etc, all kinds of ad-matching platforms, behavioral analysis and
so on;

\- generally anything advertisement-related;

\- anything military- or defense-related;

\- anything by ex-Wework and Uber because of how toxic work culture was / is
in those (just IMO);

\- sweatshops like Luxoft, Crossover etc;

\- probably would avoid corporates like Citi, McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte etc;

\- anything that produces cheaply in China and sells outside;

\- would be very careful with anything invested by Softbank directly or
through a proxy fund...

Hahaha, so probably starting a business or working for a NGO with a good cause
is the only way.

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ninetax
BAT = Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent?

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highhedgehog
Thanks, I search for it and all I could find was "British American Tobacco"

