
Ask HN: As a female/minority, how do you vet a company before taking a job? - bwb
I read stories about what it was like to work at Uber as a woman and I wonder how women and minorities vet a company they are thinking about working for or received a job offer for?<p>How do you try to screen the environment and figure out if it is a hellscape before you enter?<p>I&#x27;d welcome any feedback. I am working on a research project on how people analyze and screen when offered a new position...
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superflit
As an Minority I check for:

1\. Negative if has a "diversity" panel or ombudsman (will explain more
below).

2\. If all VPs and "big shots" came from the same university

3\. Power Ranger Factor (negative factor)

If #1 is present and there are several examples the Company is more cautious
about the virtue signalling and to avoid fire the bad "minority" will allocate
them on a "non work" club. Mostly "push paper" tasks or trivial tasks that
will not have direct impact on revenues. No good position to be it as I want
to make an impact.

#3 If in all communications there should be All "races" all the time like
Power Rangers again feels fake.

I never set my hiring forms as minority and try to best to blend in. I just
hate when people get too touchy about something from my culture or country and
don't want to touch the subject. So I have to came forward and say: "Heyyyy I
escaped from there I know how it works and how to deal with that... So please
lets be frank XX will not work maybe we should do Y" and that is it.

There are bad actors in All races. There are bad actors in Asian companies, in
Indian companies in European companies. The question is how much they hide or
fire them.

Great companies don't look your name, age or school. They look at your CV,
portfolio and ask questions about your work and your skills. They test you and
bang you are hired. They don't care about my political affiliations or if I
got to the church.

~~~
julius_set
I generally agree with you but let’s play devils advocate, at what DOES
political affiliation matter. If you know a candidate has ties to Al-Queda do
you hire them, given that their work so far and resume indicate they would
provide a 100X increase to your teams output? This would be an extreme example

~~~
superflit
I follow the laws of US.

No ties with terrorist organisations or embargoed countries.

That should clear the real bad ones.

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sergiotapia
Minority here (latino) - I literally don't think about it whatsoever. If
you're actively looking into something like that I wonder why.

If anything I ask the engineering team about recent emergencies and crunch -
but never `hOw rEpReSeNteD arE mInOritIeS`? That's gross.

~~~
fzeroracer
I mean, there are a fair amount of companies that are openly shitty to women.
I imagine it would be a good thing to avoid companies that have a high chance
of treating you like garbage.

I've made friends with some of the women I worked with back when I was a
government contractor and they had their fair share of horror stories both
working for contractors and working directly for the government. Sexual
harassment, groping, you name it.

~~~
JungleGymSam
> there are a fair amount of companies that are openly shitty to women

How much is "fair amount"? Of all the companies that exist. And where are you
getting this data from?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
That's hard to say. Many companies where this happens won't admit it
(certainly their HR departments won't). So hard numbers are hard to come by.

As best as I can tell, however, the general consensus among women seems to be:
A lot more than most men think.

~~~
username90
> Many companies where this happens won't admit it

If they don't admit it then they aren't "openly shitty to women".

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gshdg
As a woman, I avoid companies where people use “female” as a noun when
referring to humans.

On a less snarky note, I’m aware of the gender balance of my interviewers. At
a startup with an engineering team of 3, not having any other women is
expected and can be excused; but presumably there’s at least one other woman
in the company available for a culture fit interview, right? ... right?

Good signs: existence of an actual HR department (the CFO and an entry level
recruiter don’t count); women holding key leadership positions; an office full
of faces that reflect the gender and ethnic and age diversity of the city I
live in.

Red flags: a strong alcohol culture or one that involves very long hours or
lots of mandatory fun time; nobody over 30 in the office, or founders who
started the company less than 5 years out of college; an imbalance of women in
support roles; water cooler and lunch conversations self-sorting by gender or
ethnicity.

Also, many women who have been in the workforce have developed or discovered
whisper networks where we can find out about what it’s like to work at various
companies.

~~~
badpun
> an office full of faces that reflect the gender and ethnic and age diversity
> of the city I live in.

That's most likely not going to happen. Tech is a demanding industry and, with
age, lots of people start looking for easier/less demanding jobs, even if they
pay less. That's why you may see some 60+ year old COBOL maintainers, who
stepped off the tech treadmill decades ago and are just now cruising towards
retirement, but you, for the most part, won't see 60 years React developers -
people at this age value their sanity and don't want to run on the treadmill
any more.

~~~
Spooky23
> That's most likely not going to happen.

At a shitty company. Just went to a 60th birthday party for one of the tech
leads who just finished a major rollout that impacted about 50,000 people and
is standing up our SRE program.

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sethammons
Related, we extended an offer out to a younger lady who did well on our
interviews; pretty sure this was going to be her first job outside of school.
She declined our competitive offer and went with Uber, right smack dab in the
middle of the media frenzy on what was happening at Uber. I heard that she
really liked us but wanted the bigger name on her resume.

~~~
superwayne
Just out of curiosity, why did you go with "lady" and not with "woman"?

~~~
julius_set
Just out of curiosity when did we start policing words?

~~~
superflit
When we ran out of real problems to solve so we started creating new ones.

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petercooper
I am not a woman but I saw a woman post a great tweet recently (sadly I forget
who). She said that she asks the company for the details of any ex-employee
who was also female who she could speak with.

 _Update:_ Found it, it was Rachel Nabors here,
[https://twitter.com/rachelnabors/status/1114310745590726656](https://twitter.com/rachelnabors/status/1114310745590726656)

~~~
Someone1234
I absolutely get why that would be useful to a prospective employee.

But I cannot understand how it would work in practice:

\- Your former employer is giving out your contact information so you can help
them recruit(?)

\- Your former employer is asking you to essentially work for free

\- But if your former employer offers you compensation now your opinion is
biased

\- You may have liability issues (e.g. you say something unfavorable OR
favorable, and you can be sued by the perspective employee or former employer)

Rachel Nabors on twitter said it worked in the past, and I won't discount her
experiences. I am genuinely curious to understand how the former employer
arranged that with a former employee though.

~~~
minnca
>Your former employer is giving out your contact information so you can help
them recruit(?)

I think a lot of women would view a request like this as helping other women,
rather than helping the company. Plus, as Nabors points out, the company would
presumably ask the ex-employee permission before giving out contact info.

------
minnca
Interview vibes matter. As a woman, if the men (it's usually men) that
interview me talk down to me or use patronizing language (however subtle),
that's a red flag, though not necessarily a deal-breaker. Also, it's a
personal pet peeve of mine if men constantly hold the door/say "after you" and
let me walk through the door first. That's a sign that they treat women as
"ladies" (just fyi to men, pls don't call the women you work with "ladies")
not colleagues. You can usually pick up on this (the door thing) in an
interview, in my experience.

~~~
sethammons
It is always interesting to get different perspectives from folks.

How do you filter the people who hold the door for everyone vs the ones that
are only doing it for ladies? Or for those fellas who where told countless
times as a youth to hold the door for a woman. Because someone is polite, that
is a red flag?

As for calling a woman a lady this one is new to me, and I don't think I've
ever used the word "colleague" aloud in my life. I would say, "that is a
{guy|lady} that I work with." I've never been made aware previously that
referring to a woman as a lady would be taken negatively. I had only heard
that some woman don't care for ma'am as they can feel that is a title for an
older woman. fwiw, I do tend to use gender neutral words like "they" or "them"
over he/she when writing.

~~~
minnca
> "that is a {guy|lady} that I work with."

"Person" also works in this case. +1 for they. "Lady" seems patronizing to me
- would you call someone a "gentleman"? To me, "lady" describes a woman who is
"traditionally feminine" – I get that when people use "lady" today they don't
typically mean "traditionally feminine," but "lady" is still evocative of a
time when women were seen as delicate/demure/less than men.

~~~
sethammons
Language changes and evolves. I don't think that it means "feminine" as much
anymore and is less paired to "gentlemen;" instead, I think most people use it
as a drop-in replacement for woman, girl, etc. Similarly, "gay" has gone from
"happy" to a self-describing word for homosexual men, to a pejorative, to a
stand in word for "dumb" (man, that field-trip was gay), and now is more
towards a non-negative way to refer to homosexual males. All that aside, I'll
take the opportunity to reflect on my use of "lady" and I'll ask some of the
woman I work with on the side what their opinion is. Thanks for the food for
thought.

------
alexcabrera
If the company or client makes a point about me being a minority or begins to
tell me about their diversity or inclusion efforts, that's a hard-pass.

