
One Question You Should Ask About Every New Job - pavornyoh
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/opinion/sunday/the-one-question-you-should-ask-about-every-new-job.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
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acconrad
This is a pretty click-baity article that actually is more like 3 questions:

1\. Is it a fair/just company? (Will I get promotions and raises for working
hard?)

2\. Is it safe? (Will I get fired for trying and failing at a task?)

3\. Is it a place that provides autonomy? (Can I shape my own destiny here?
Will I have influence?)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Good discriminators, and a more interesting way to vetting is to look at these
questions, the answers from the company will all be positive, and then
validate their answers against historical performance. Differences between
answers and execution reveal how they are managed.

Put another way, if your company espouses values that it doesn't actually
value in practice, then you probably want to find a different place to work
:-)

~~~
FF76
how would you go about finding out this information as an outsider of the
company?

~~~
acconrad
Look at LinkedIn to see if long-time employees have gotten promotions. See
what their turnover is like (if people are dropping like flies, particularly
in a certain division/team, you can bet it's not a very safe place). Also see
what kind of side projects develop out of the team. If you see tons of
internal tools and useful "hackathon"-esque features, you can bet there's
quite a bit of autonomy to be able to develop those kinds of things.

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mrlyc
I look for three things at a new job: interesting work, nice people to work
with and a financially stable company. I often have to pick two out of three.

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cryoshon
Hm. A lot to unpack here:

"When it comes to landing a good job, many people focus on the role. Although
finding the right title, position and salary is important, there’s another
consideration that matters just as much: culture. The culture of a workplace —
an organization’s values, norms and practices — has a huge impact on our
happiness and success."

This is the framing statement of the article. I would like to dispute that
there is a way to separate titles, positions, salaries, and "culture". The
"culture" of many places is to offer "open plan seating", sweatshirts, jargon,
memes, snacks, soda, gym membership, happy hours, a poor salary relative to
the skills demanded, and work the employees to the bone until they're burnt
out. Stated differently: an organization's actual values (above all, profit
seeking) are usually not the same as its stated values and non sequitor
doodads. Typically, I hear people discussing "how special/strong the culture
is here" in a cultlike way which sounds much like Stockholm syndrome to me.
Sillicon Valley types are exceedingly prone to this kind of outward self-
deception.

"“Organizational cultures, and in particular stories, carry a claim to
uniqueness — that an institution is unlike any other,” the researchers wrote.
But paradoxically, the same stories occur “in virtually identical form, in a
wide variety of organizations.”"

Uh huh. That's because the whole story of "corporate culture" does little to
break up the humdrum fact that work needs to get done correctly, which means
that it tends to be performed in a broadly similar fashion across an industry.
The culture of working at a corporation as the primary mode of life is the
corporate culture, and all instances of it will be chained to that fact, even
if the details are different.

"The M.I.T. professor Edgar H. Schein observes that the most visible parts of
an organization’s culture are the artifacts and practices — how people talk,
look and act. There are lots of organizations where people laugh at unique
jokes, speak in unusual jargon, decorate their office spaces in unconventional
ways, or have funky rules and norms. But the more defining parts of a culture
are its values. Values are the principles people say are important and, more
crucially, the principles people show are important through their actions."

The primary value of the corporation is profit-seeking, and there are many
secondary values (customer service, quality assurance) that are directly
related to this primary value. There is sometimes room for tertiary/aesthetic
values to be more prominent in the minds and lives of the employees than the
primary values; in these situations, we can say that there is a defined
corporate culture. While a corporate culture may or may not evolve
organically, its purpose is clear: vastly and cheaply increase employee
productivity and retention.

In this sense, the article has a point: it's better to work for a company that
has a corporate culture because such arrangements tend to increase your
satisfaction as an employee. But, as always, be cynical: when taken to its
logical conclusion, the objective of a corporate culture is to keep you on
board and working hard even if circumstances would cause you to leave. Whether
organic or intentionally formed, a corporate culture serves the owners more
than it serves you.

