> Abusing employees is more or less expected, out in techland.
Which techland do you live in? In my techland there are tons of jobs at places without abusive leadership where you can get a job in a few weeks. No one I know in my land expects this sort of treatment as everyone knows it won't stand.
I guess it depends on what they meant by "techland".
I think companies who are tech companies or where tech is central to the product tend to attract good tech leaders who treat their teams well.
But at companies where tech is seen as a secondary to the product tech employees are sometimes treated poorly, with things like overwork/abuse of agile processes to extract more work out of developers, unsustainable on-call rotations, unreasonable support response expectations, understaffed teams, restricted budgets, inadequate equipment like super cheap budget laptops, etc.
Sure they might add a foosball table and buy a pizza once in a while, but by and large many companies don't treated tech especially well. I'm not sure if it is a lack of respect (some companies see developers as a pluggable commodity) or resentment for having to pay them more than they think they should have to.
I guess it depends on where you live, but some cities just don't have a lot of pure tech companies, so you are stuck with places like these.
> Sure they might add a foosball table and buy a pizza once in a while, but by and large many companies don't treated tech especially well. I'm not sure if it is a lack of respect (some companies see developers as a pluggable commodity) or resentment for having to pay them more than they think they should have to.
And they tend to get crushed by real tech companies. Honestly the test is pretty simple; if you go grab a drink and it's anything other than free and if you see anything other than retina screens on the floor it's a red flag.
If you go as far as to negotiate an offer and it's not exclusively engineers or former engineers between you and the CEO or if there's no stocks/equity you know you are off to a pretty bad start.
> I guess it depends on where you live, but some cities just don't have a lot of pure tech companies, so you are stuck with places like these.
Appreciate the general point, but, um ... Retinas aren't everything.
There are monitors with fine enough colors, and (actually more important my PoV) better base / stand infrastructure, for example. And don't know about you, but some us don't particularly like seeing that dystopian forbidden fruit logo everywhere you look. Or supporting the company behind it any more than strictly necessary.
Point being - yes, beware of sweat shops with substandard hardware. But brands aren't where it's at.
Oh and also: just give me decent cash comp, 40 hours at most, and a useful amount of actual, real PTO (not this "unlimited PTO" nonsense). And an office (to the extent I have to be there) that doesn't make me feel like I'm losing plasma by the end of the day. And investors that don't make my skin crawl, please.
I agree with everything you said except this point.
> And they tend to get crushed by real tech companies.
You'd be surprised how many legacy businesses are out there, places in the US other than the west coast, who are thriving still and haven't been disrupted.
Things like banking, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare. All of these industries have competition from startups, but are far from being crushed by them... Not yet at least.
I like your litmus tests though. I think it is helpful for people to have some specific things they look out for as red flags, as some "little things" can really be an early indicator into how it would be to work there.
> Things like banking, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare. All of these industries have competition from startups, but are far from being crushed by them... Not yet at least.
All of these are either low margins or extremely regulated (healthcare). Not interesting targets.
I agree that there are places like that, I worked at one briefly.. the key there being the word 'briefly'. As soon as it got annoying I started looking and had a new job pretty quick.
Lack of mobility used to be an issue as well, but with all the current remote work possibilities this is no longer the case. The bad employers will end up with the bottom of the barrel, just like in cities with lots of good options, as all their talent will be able to find work elsewhere.
I work in consulting, so thankfully I don't get stuck somewhere bad for long, but I have seen it first hand on many occasions. Enough to be jaded I guess.
You're right that remote work helps this a lot.
I do think that landing a remote job is probably more difficult for someone who is only an average / mediocre developer. You're competing against a larger pool of talented developers.
Which techland do you live in? In my techland there are tons of jobs at places without abusive leadership where you can get a job in a few weeks. No one I know in my land expects this sort of treatment as everyone knows it won't stand.