I've worked mostly in Silicon Valley. At bigger tech companies I found that the minimum level of competence is a bit higher, maybe because of the aggressive stack ranking and PIP/firing pressure. At small companies either low bar is very high, or it's nonexistent, I've seen both.
The weird thing is, at a high performing organization it's relatively straight forward to get a job: be very good at what you do and practice for their hiring process.
At a dysfunctional organization there's not really a way to get hired (apart from an internal recommendation). This is almost by definition, as their hiring process doesn't measure anything reliably. Being physically attractive or charismatic helps a lot.
Actually this gives me an interesting idea, can you measure the quality of an engineering team purely by how ugly they are? My hypothesis is that a dysfunctional team has a low ability to measure aptitude, and so things like physical attractiveness will have a higher impact on hiring decisions.
I don't blame you for wanting a nice stint in one of these dysfunctional companies, I think I could have worked an hour a week and been praised as a top performer at the ones I unfortunately spent time at. I think if you do go this direction you should get 2 or 3 such jobs. It's only a tiny bit more work, and these companies tend to just stop existing some random Tuesday.
I too have been nothing short of perpetually shocked at how dysfunctional a large part of the software industry is. This is why I'm never able to take the "engineering" moniker seriously when people talk about programming.
The hiring process is so maddening and I'm glad you said that.
I get that resume scanning and what not is fully automated and makes no allusion to being a useful nor functioning process, but I'm perpetually amazed as I submit resumes (where I meet or exceed every "requirement") to companies I know are not well-functioning organizations only to be rewarded with an automated rejection email minutes later.
The weird thing is, at a high performing organization it's relatively straight forward to get a job: be very good at what you do and practice for their hiring process.
At a dysfunctional organization there's not really a way to get hired (apart from an internal recommendation). This is almost by definition, as their hiring process doesn't measure anything reliably. Being physically attractive or charismatic helps a lot.
Actually this gives me an interesting idea, can you measure the quality of an engineering team purely by how ugly they are? My hypothesis is that a dysfunctional team has a low ability to measure aptitude, and so things like physical attractiveness will have a higher impact on hiring decisions.
I don't blame you for wanting a nice stint in one of these dysfunctional companies, I think I could have worked an hour a week and been praised as a top performer at the ones I unfortunately spent time at. I think if you do go this direction you should get 2 or 3 such jobs. It's only a tiny bit more work, and these companies tend to just stop existing some random Tuesday.