Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

I loved every minute of my time working at Netflix. Great, talented coworkers who I could constantly learn from, management chain from bottom to top of former engineers, so they understood when you would say, "I worked on this for a week but have no results because it didn't work". Plenty of resources to do what you needed to do, and lots of autonomy to do what you thought was right. Very little process and upper management actively moved to eliminate what little process there was. Unlimited vacation time that was real -- management took long vacations to set an example and would actively encourage everyone to do the same. And of course a great paycheck which included 10%+ raises because they made sure that new people didn't make more than veterans.

I'll be the first to admit it's not for everyone. As they say, they are a sports team, not a family. Perform well and be rewarded handsomely, perform poorly and get cut with a big check. I personally thrived in that kind of environment, where you always have to keep proving your value. But not everyone wants to work that way.

I've never worked for a big famous tech firm, but I will absolutely tell you how I've managed to avoid hating work for 30 years:

Find a relatively small firm, still owner-run and controlled. Avoid public firms. A corporation cannot show loyalty, but a HUMAN can. A manager has no real control -- their manager can reverse them. When you work for the owner, you can trust things a bit more IF you're working for a trustworthy person.

This means small. But it doesn't mean cheap. ;)

That said, I've probably left money on the table working this way, and I'll never get IPO stock or similar, but stability and ethical behavior in a workplace go a LONG way.

I work for a small financial SaaS in Boston. 30-50 people. Nobody offshore. I've worked here for 18 years and 11 months and a couple of days. Yes, we're hiring.

The best thing about the company are the people who are already here. The basic hiring criteria are "clever, competent and kind". That doesn't mean we never have disagreements, but they tend to be technical disagreements about the best approach to reach the same goal. Before the pandemic, and hopefully after it, the kitchen was the center of the company: casual questions turned into great discussions, explanations... there's a big whiteboard wall in the kitchen, and it got used a lot.

That goal, incidentally, is to drive down the cost of good portfolio analysis until it's within everyone's reach. We're succeeding: there are clients who have programs where people start their investments with $50/week.

Our folks are reasonably diverse in terms of background and talents. There's a robust co-op program. The benefits are pretty good -- fully paid health care premiums -- but it's definitely the people that make it great.

One challenge is that even in sucky workplaces, there always seem to be champions that will tell you how great it is. In part because it's a hard life focusing on how your job sucks and many people get good at being outwardly optimistic.

That said, it would be nice to see more authenticity than what mostly gets posted in the hiring thread, and on company websites. I'm sure we each have our own criteria of what kind of info we'd like to see, but I rarely see anything more than the usual bromides.

Honestly, I've found glassdoor to be pretty good if you've had a few jobs before. It's pretty easy to find which reviews to discard, and read between the lines for red flags even in places that are relatively highly rated.

I've been at Facebook for about a year and a half. Before this I was at startups in the marketing and financial industries. We've been under scrutiny for the whole time that I've been there, and the company is pretty unpopular from a vocal population on here, but it's been really nice to work for.

We obviously have job security, and I've been very impressed with the management chain above me. At least on my team, they all come from eng for a few levels until you start hitting VP roles. The fact that they were at least fairly recently technical helps with understanding some of the traditional pain points I've run into in the past in dealing with management.

Everything is built in house, which does have some drawbacks but it's nice that we can interface directly with the people who are working on all of our tools. And everything has an API so there is a great amount of inter-tool integration. Developers get raises, on my team Eng has a big say in what the product is going to be, idk it seems like it checks all of the boxes you're asking about.

Also it's kind of fun to see the company I work for get mercilessly memed all the time.

One thing quick - this is incredibly subjective. I've worked in some amazing companies but there were always people on Glassdoor or Blind who found something to complain about.

People are fundamentally different. Someone may really enjoy structure and being told exactly what they have to do. Others want ambiguity and open-ended challenges. Some want stability, some want opportunity. So when you hear someone complain about a company (or praise it, I guess) it's important to ask yourself whether this person's values and interests are similar to yours.

Also keep in mind that people who are crushing it are much less likely to spend time talking about this stuff, while people who are not doing well/miserable have more incentive to vent. So often times it's not just subjective to the person but you're more likely to hear complaining than praise all other things being equal.

I work for Esri and it's great. (we do GIS -- geospatial information systems. Our customers include all 50 (US) state governments, like half the Fortune 500s, most national governments...) Virtually everyone has an office, no open office nonsense. There's no pressure to be a 10x developer or whatever, you just do your job. Nobody gets let go for being a mediocre developer. Everyone's hourly, so if you want to work 40 hours a week and go home, that's fine, or if you want to work 60 hours a week and get 50% more money that's fine too. It is, for the most part, a very chill, relaxed work environment.

The owner is a good person. Big into environmental activism. The big company conference is mostly about all environmental conservation (also we added new features to our product). It's weird to work for a big company and get an e-mail from Jane Goodall at Christmas thanking us for the work we do.

The money isn't great though, that's the biggest downside. But personally the money isn't that important to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esri

https://www.esri.com/jobs

In my experience small companies tend to be the best to work for, but this varies wildly.

Large companies are more reliably mediocre across the board, but bad small companies can be outright abusive (usually you can detect these with a few questions in an interview... for example, ask how often employees work outside of regular hours).

I’d rather just pick one that pays the most while letting me keep sane work hours of 8-9 hours per weekday and doesn’t have 24hr on-call schedule for one person during that person’s on-call rotation.

Quit Uber in 3 months - simply the most pathetic work-life balance I’ve experienced. What a toxic place! What made me sad that I had taken Uber BLR over Fb London.

Worked at an Indian startup for few years - it was balanced. Nothing great, nothing shitty.

Working at a USA startup currently who flat out lied about timing and timezone requirements which I was specific about - so after some time I sent a polite but firm fuck you email one day after mass rejecting all the odd hour meetings from my calendar and setting my google calendar to reject anything after 6pm automatically everyday. They have stopped bothering me but I’m the exception there. It’s a very uncomfortable silence. So leaving soon.

Samsung was really nice. I appreciate the place in hindsight now. Disliked back then. What a blessing it was that let alone work I couldn’t even access email from out of office. And 9-5 was the norm even for managers and higher management.

Yeah, I’m done with the rhetoric of challenge, excitement, ownership, and shit like that that are just buzzwords used as fronts for exploitation. Will take work-life balance over and above anything today.

I work at a small API doc company called ReadMe, we're ~40 people currently and I've been here since we were 5 people. It's been incredible to see the company grow over the years. We hire excellent people who tend to stick around. We treat people with respect and give them the tools to succeed.

We interview a little differently than most other startups (https://blog.readme.com/designing-a-candidate-focused-interv... ); we've always had very flexible working arrangements (even pre-Covid) and we have a modern codebase (Node.js + React) with high test coverage.

I lead the engineering team now (but still write and review code regularly). We're hiring for a bunch of different roles across the stack (and a management position): https://readme.com/careers. My (personal) email is in my profile if you wanna have a chat!

The tricky thing about this question is that a great company for one person could be a terrible company for another, and vice versa.

Based on your description, it sounds like you're looking for a smaller company where the CEO is technical, and understands what the developers are doing.

This is probably an under talked-about part of the interview process: that you should be interviewing the company as much as the company is interviewing you.

No easy answers here I think...

I ended up at Shopify by way of a small startup I was at being acquired. I didn't know much about the company at the time thinking it was basically an ecommerce website builder. I don't think I would have chosen it on my own. I usually go for tech-heavy startups with significant technical challenges whether it's building up the product or scaling it up and the tech plays a large part of my interests. I ended up working at a Ruby/Rails shop once before and I didn't like it at first and got used to it while I was there. The RoR at Shopify is much more structured the way I would expect a good team of engineers would build something rather than a one-off solo dev. There's also a fair amount of in-house tech so it's Shopify-flavored-RoR. This is fine, but all pretty subjective.

The parts that I think most would find positive is that the company is very transparent internally with high alignment from executive through development. Management is technically aware for companies of any size and especially for a large one. Most decisions are easy to understand and rarely (if ever, can't remember one) has caused me internal conflict of interests. Regardless of the tech used, I haven't gotten bored or needing a challenge for very long. Each new project presents new challenges, that's left for the team to research, prototype, and build. I spend very little time in meetings, and usually only those I want to addend (e.g. team standups, tech talks, show n tells).

Subjective downsides: the company is remote (not '-first' or 'for now', but always for everyone) though team IRL events are +1. The main tech is RoR, MySQL, Go, Redis, Kafka, Elasticsearch. Some groups (e.g. data) use other languages/tools. Of course there's also lots of front-end web/mobile dev that has the challenge of building an extensible platform. Spending time on related opensource work is good. I made some contribs to Sorbet type checker.

Long reply, in short I usually leave a startup after 1.5 - 2 years because it doesn't have anything more for me. I'm coming up on 3 years now.

I have have enjoyed working at the EPA (US Government) as an IT Specialist.

The good parts are working with people passionate about their jobs, on things that truly matter. Work life balance and management trust is very high.

The bad parts are there as well: outdated technology, lots of committees, long processes to do certain things. Pay is less then I could get in industry.

Mixed bag: Not a "fast to fire" environment. Ethics/values are very high but that doesn't automatically mean good management. You need to meet and work with a lot of people.. but people are very open to collaborating.

I have heard that the government in a way is supposed to be the "model employer"; kind of being an example to others in terms of diversity/inclusion, time off policies, benefits, etc. And I think is that sort of true at least at this agency.

https://usajobs.gov

If I knew, I'd work there already...

Slightly more serious, it's often more about your team than the company overall. If your manager is terrible, life is hell. If your manager's manager is terrible, it's going to be pretty uncomfortable. If the executives are terrible, you might do okay, but keep your resume up to date and shop around just in case they wreck it.

I want to preface this by saying I would strongly heed the advice of version_five. All of the most toxic work places I've been at had cheerleaders that would tell you it was amazing.

I have struggled with this issue for years and my approach was to build some heuristics based on where I've been happiest. I fundamentally believe the job landscape now for developers is just systemically worse than it was a decade ago, but these are things I've learned:

- Are you treated with respect throughout the interview. All the companies I've been happiest at had interviews that were basically extended conversations (even if they had coding challenges). I always felt comfortable and respected, different answers than expected where treated with curiosity rather than skepticism. Above all else you need to honestly ask "are these people I want to work with everyday"?

- B2B targeting larger customers tends to be much better than direct to consumer. Every "customer focused" team I've worked with is ultimately driven by a single moronic KPI, and ends up spending all of their energy trying to cheat users while convincing themselves that this is really good work. Large B2B contracts last for years and have a lot of revenue associated with them so there more room for thoughtful product development.

- How important is engineering as you climb the ladder? Is technical leadership (especially above you) really technical? Are they the kind of people that still like hacking on projects, solving technical problems? At my happiest companies technical competence continues up the ladder as far as it can. Your direct manager should be someone that hacking on an unsolved problem with would be fun.

- How financially healthy is the company? This doesn't mean "do they have a lot of funding", in my experience funding without fundamentals leads to weird behavior product wise as teams rush to please investors and come up with ways to survive. If investors and leadership and genuinely happy with the company there is a lot less pressure to do strange product things.

- I used to think smaller companies were my favorite, but have found that a good small team in a large company can be just as good if not better.

After several runs at some of the worst companies in my career I also felt it was impossible to find anything that was enjoyable. I'm currently at a place (that I won't name) where I finally enjoy going to work again, and feel no interest in dusting off my resume anytime soon. This above rules helped a lot with that.

What I'd love to know is how to find the smaller more "hacker" oriented shops. I've worked at a few over the years... the kinds of places where everyone in engineering uses Linux desktops because that's the best choice for the work at hand and everyone's comfortable with it. Where the product is good, makes money, but is maybe kind of niche so the company isn't adding 10 people a week.

From my experience: - NVIDIA seems to have best balance of culture of competency, work satisfaction vs how well is run, although it is getting more bureaucratic as it grows - Google used to be good in many aspects but now things are deteriorating - Facebook is mixed bag, where Oculus part is more of a wild west and main FB is still ok better than Google - Amazon other than "hire to fire" (loading your RSUs towards the end and then raising the bar to force you out before main RSU chunk gets vested) is a mixed bag - Intel is with a royally broken culture, rampant nepotism and crooked HR (just try to google HR flagging employees "THIEVE" just so they do not get re-hired regardless of their performance and also read in the Oregonian news about age discrimination where they mopped large number of actual best engineers - no wonder they lost the edge and are sinking further, not sure if the current CEO who is the best thing that happened to them can save them anymore. My bet if he does not do HR and culture cleanup, he won't be able to do much. The only hope for Intel is geo-political move of the fab manufacturing to the US but even that will have mixed effect.) - Apple is mixed bag, with some teams better and some worse and all suffering from culture of secrecy All in all in each company you can find a good team with a good manager/director/VP as well as you can find bad ones. All pay competitively, where Intel is at the bottom followed by NVIDIA although case by case for higher grades both can compete if needed.

Do your research. There’s tons of “Best places to work” lists out there. Glassdoor and LinkedIn. Probe your network of friends, acquaintances, friends of friends.

I work for Red Hat in Presales. Formerly of Red Hat Consulting for 4.5 years. I’ve been here over 5 years now. Love the place. I’ve only ever worked on our Kubernetes distribution, OpenShift and related products. Great mission. Great work to do. Great people to work with. Good Managers. We’re always hiring.

I also worked at NASA/JPL at the start of my career. Worked on the Mars Rovers, satellite network simulations and then enterprise software. Also great work to do. Great mission. Great people to work with. Good management. Pay was always behind industry. But hard to complain when closing down a project can sometimes mean creating an archive for submission to the National Archives.

I loved working at Microsoft. From a management that actually cares and understands dev struggles to great code review practices that don't waste dev time with bs.

Plenty of opportunities to learn, switch teams if needed. I've seen people shift from team to team just because they wanted to add their expertise to another product.

I'll admit, if you're a startup kinda guy you might find things a bit slower than you're used to. Focus is kept on extreme quality.

I hate the fact that Microsoft gets a bad rep coz of the older practices from Gates and Balmer's time. As a company it's really changed and they've embraced open-source finally.

> Project managers don't know anything about technology

In my 10+ years of experience, that's the rule rather than an exception. It is very rare to find a Project/Product manager who actually has decent technical knowledge. I think I've found one or two in my whole career (one is now product VP, the other moved to Switzerland).

Red Hat.

Worked there as an intern during college, continued for few more years and returned there after a brief stint at a startup.

Work/life balance is great, most code public has so many advantages and colleagues are friendly and decent humans.

Some teams might be worse than what I experienced, but even if I was growing mildly frustrated (i.e. pressure from product people to push product out of hte gate before it was ready and I was one of hte damned QA people), the robust internal transfer system meant, I could just move to a team where I felt my contribution was more valued even from non-programmers ;)

I am a Drupal developer for a government contractor. Management absolutely knows what the product is, and our PM knows the sites we build and maintain inside and out (both from a Technical and a UX/Design perspective). The pace is probably slower than a lot of devs are used to, and there are a lot of moving parts, but that is what it's like working around government hierarchy. I for one like the well-defined structure.

It absolutely does not suck. The people involved are not hotshot CS grads moving from FAANG to FAANG trying to get salary boosts every 6 months. They've been doing this kind of work their whole lives, and just want stability.

Also, that team in Transylvania are an excellent bunch of developers who've probably been doing CS since they were in middle school, so don't knock them for being foreign. Knock your company for offshoring their labor. Those Transylvanians are trying to make something of themselves and improve the standard of living in Romania. Case in point, I was one of them.

The main takeaway is that who doesn't suck to work for depends on what you want. You want money? The people giving a lot of money probably only care about you inasmuch as you produce something worthy of your salary. Beyond that (and whatever 'perks' they pretend to offer), they don't give a rat's ass about you. You want to feel like you're part of something? Get involved with a small-ish team in a mid-size company with long-term clients. Your life will be part of a team, the company won't have too much middle management, and long term clients mean long term goals.

I work for a consulting company called Slalom and for 3.5 years now I don't know if I've been happier working. It's a (private) big global place, but we have a "local market model" which effectually means you feel like you're working for a much smaller company (which is your home office). I still get to do plenty of development work during projects, but I also get to work in people leadership, practice leadership, give conference talks, sell if I want to (note: I don't lol), and the best part from a developer's standpoint is that when a project is over, you just... Leave. After almost 5 years of being responsible for an ever-growing list of software I had to maintain alone at a startup, it's a really liberating feeling for my ADHD self. And yes, we're hiring worldwide!

Grafana is incredible. I was pleased with the conscious and clear hiring, the apparent calm and emotional safety exuded by those who interviewed. And then when I joined by the integrity and leadership, which has a strong vision and great execution, coupled with real empathy for engineers and our customers. I'm loving it and it stands as a very stark contrast to my previous roles, and I hear similar from my colleagues at all levels too. Lots of autonomy, space to do a good job, a learning and personal growth culture. The way above average number of smart people to learn from. It's always been remote so they get this right.

What is more individual is that the rapid growth creates a lot of change, and that isn't for everyone so do bear in mind that YMMV depending on who you are but it really is a great place to work.

This is highly dependent on who you are as a person, but I'd honestly say most of the big tech firms excepting a few which you can suss out based on reputation.

IMO people overestimate how much you can know about whether a team will be good over the span of 2+ years. I've had several friends land at a small company with what seemed like a great team and then the great manager was replaced by a bad one, the job started sucking, and everyone had to jump ship and go on a new job search. If it happens soon enough after you join you may not be able to leave for over a year for appearance's sake.

At big companies, you can still get bad teams but many places, such as Stripe, make it super easy to switch teams for a better fit.

I've been working for Xero since three years. It's a great place to work. Free barista coffee, fruits and social gathering every Friday. Everyone is very helpful and nice. Waiting to move into a brand new office here in Melbourne, AU. It's great to work for a company that cares about ethics and governance. We've to jump through several hoops before we can do anything with customer data. I have a lot of freedom in terms what tools to choose for my work. I've never had such experience working for big IT consulting companies prior to Xero.

Disclaimer: I'm a current employee here. I'm a data analyst! I haven't been asked or paid to write this. haha.

I work for an education focused nonprofit (medium sized 1000~) and while I still get frustrated at times, it's the 'this can be even better' VS the 'this is hell on earth' that I've dealt with at big corporations. Everyone is so dang nice which coupled with a savvy ceo and flexible work life has been ridiculously soothing to my previously burnt-out self. The unpleasant people that exist at all businesses are rare and are definite noted outliers. Even if people get upset or frustrated, it's always clear that it's about the situation or problem rather than lashing out at others. It is sweet relief to work with people that care about what they do and having the mission being a genuinely good thing. There is a practical and people first culture exemplified by remote only if you choose, transparent pay ranges, great benefits, and a sense of we can be better than we were in most aspects of the biz. We are in dire need of architect roles and have a variety of other dev, tech, and biz reqs posted. Like any org, there is room for improvement but those improvements don't feel insurmountable. :)

GM. No really. Hear me out.

Great work/life balance, benefits, and management structure.

They're transitioning to remote work if your job allows it. A large percentage of the company is already work from home. I just got permission to go lower 48 US remote a few days ago.

And they're doing a lot of really cool shit. Ultium. Cruise. Brightdrop. Almost no matter what your specialty, GM has it.

I'm challenged every day. My coworkers are smart and driven. If you don't like what you're doing, you can move. A year ago I was a hands-on mechanical engineer with little coding experience who wanted to transfer to software. Now I'm a fully remote controls engineer.

Mary Barra is a hell of a CEO. She's forward-thinking and isn't afraid to push the company in the direction she thinks it should go in, and so far, she's been right on the money. She champions diversity, and it's not just for show. Barra has transformed GM from a stodgy good-old-boys garbage-producing shitshow into an innovation powerhouse, the world hasn't recognized it yet.

My friend built TrueUp (https://www.trueup.io/rankings). It has curated listings and rankings of companies related to diversity, ethical issues, employee happiness, and so on. This may be a useful tool when researching what companies to work for.

VMware has a lot of different teams working on very different and interesting problems. It's not listed with the FAANG companies, but it pays well and you won't feel like you're making the world worse off than it is.

You'll probably see some complaints about some teams in VMware, but it's been mostly a great place to work.

> There's an offshore team in Traansylvania busy making it a legacy codebase

As someone working for a US company in Mexico, I take offense at that :(.

I've really enjoyed working for Linode. We're a smaller company (~250 people total), but work on a global scale. I've found the work to be challenging but rewarding, leadership to be approachable and willing to listen, and the benefits to be great. Coming from a large higher education environment (where the "Information Services" department was 600+ people) it's remarkable how much better the culture is here.

Honestly, I don't think it's possible to create a list like that. Certainly some companies are holistically better than others, but so so so much of it depends on an individual's manager, team, likes, dislikes and other externalities. Companies have better and worse moments, better and worse leadership, but if a company is a great fit for you today, it could be a bad fit in a couple of years.

I think a better place to focus than looking for non-shitty companies would be focusing on finding coworkers who are good at navigating the shit in a way you respect. When the going gets rough, who are the people you want to be around? What are the behaviors you want them to show you? How can you determine that in an interview?

I have had amazing managers and coworkers at Google. People that cared for me as a person, helped me grow technically and supported me career.

Obviously at a huge company there will be a lot of variance, but on my teams I have had a lot of autonomy to choose what to work on and how to make it happen. That was a big reason why I enjoyed it so much there.

I enjoyed working at Google, but it was incredibly team dependent. Spent two stints there (4y and 2y), on three separate teams. First team was frustrating, second two teams were wonderful.

I feel like a lot of interviewing is figuring out if the company is good to work for. The one time I jumped right into a job, I had the above experiences like you did (small startup). Since then, I try to spend an hour with most of the people that would be in my decision tree. Quickly discover if they a) know where the product should go b) I get along with them culturally c) they are good at their jobs.

Cisco.

Great teamwork and culture, tons of smart and friendly people, interesting technical problems (I think computer networking is interesting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), opportunities for growth, and good work-life balance.

One thing to note is that much of this might be because I got lucky and joined the team that was part of the OpenDNS acquisition.

This requires information about you that others dont have. What is "sucky" to you apart from your very short list? Some people thrive on hard work, others love the lax lifestyle of a cushy job. Best advice? Ask your former coworkers, you shared mutual experiences and likely have opinions to bounce off eachother. If you find they shared similar values, find out where they are now and how that experience is going. This also allows for conversations at length as opposed to a comment which may or may not be nuanced enough to be helpful.

Koch Industries

Truly unique culture (go read Good Profit). Shockingly flexible organization, willing to do what’s best in the long run, and is investing tens of billions dollars in technology across numerous industries (Infor and Molex at one end of the spectrum and Flint Hills resources and Georgia Pacific at the other).

https://jobs.kochcareers.com/search/information-systems-and-...

I started out at Microsoft out of college and spent 6 years there.

Yes, it was a pay cut compared to some job-hopping a few peers did. But the environment was great, my coworkers were wonderful, and I got to develop deep expertise to the point where I'm legitimately a world expert in a specialized domain now.

Like any big company, results vary by division/org/team, but if you land in a good place, you'll have the pleasure of working with great people who care about your growth and well-being. Not a bad deal.

I agree with other comments saying that this is going to depend on what you're looking for and on your personal situation -- there is no job that is right for everyone.

That being said, I recently joined Coda as an SRE, and I have really enjoyed it so far. Company size is in my personal sweet spot: the team is small enough that it still has the startup aspects of having visibility into everything happening in the company and being able to work on anything you feel is important, but it's big enough that things are relatively stable, there are lots of resources, there aren't fires all the time. The team is incredible: everyone I have worked with is extremely capable but also extremely nice and humble. Many people joined from highly unconventional backgrounds but Coda hired them for their passion for their roles. I have also felt that the company prioritizes employees in ways both big and small, from little things (e.g. every interview started with checking in to make sure the time was still okay, nice gesture with the chaos of online/remote interviewing) to big things like comp/equity (instead of stock options, you have the option to receive the equity as a grant, or as a loan if you don't have capital to pay the taxes on a grant, and you have the option to sell some stock in every fundraising round even though we aren't public). Several of the founders had kids while starting the company, so there was a strong culture of work/life balance from the beginning. We have our share of tech debt, but so far I have thought the codebase and tooling have been really high quality too.

Email in my bio if you want to chat.

LEGO A/S Denmark - Denmark location

Positives: + Great product that kids of all ages (1-99) all around the world like and will want to talk to you when you say you work for LEGO + Healthy work life balance + Company really cares about it's employees (not just on paper) + Family owned + Huge emphasis on doing this in legal, ethical ways + Profit gets reinvested in renewable energy and similar projects and in significant percentage given to good causes + Plenty of work for IT people in different parts of organization (take your pick...) + Relocation is handled/helped by the company + Most of the areas are quite international

Negatives: - If you do not get hired for CPH office, your workplace will be Billund on Jutland which is boooooooring (good if you are a parent) - Weather sucks in Denmark, so if you come from somewhere more south you will complain - Like in any big company, promotions, implementation of ideas ect can be based both on rational reasons like contribution, ROI and office politics (depends on departments) - Some areas might be more amateurish than you are used to in IT solution oriented companies (SAAS and similar)...but you can view it as places for improvement

Disclosure: I have worked and am working at LEGO as an IT-ish engineer for 5+ years.

Feel free to ask questions.

This may be hard to believe for the HN crowd but hp has been great for me (Corvallis, OR). Sure, we're not the company Bill & Dave started but current leadership has steered the boat out of the mess created by 10+ years of rocky times.

IMHO: 1. Company should be small. I worked in a few small companies. One have grown to headcount above 200 and became a swamp full of unmotivated people. 2. There should be great team members. 3. Founders should be software people or engineers.

I work for a small software consultancy that was acquired by one of its clients. I'm the only engineer. No meetings, no micro-managing, wide variety of tasks, interesting technical challenges, sometimes no work. Bliss.

I work for a small financial company called Cypher.trade (building out a futures platform on Solana) and I really like working there. Everyone in the team is amazingly skilled and management is hands-off but detailed enough for you to know exactly what to do.

I find the company refreshing because:

- They allow remote workers in any time zone

- Expectations for engineers are reasonable

- The requirements for the product are well defined

- Team members are competent

- Communication is decent

This honestly avoids many of the problems I've had to deal with early on in my career. It has been a good place to work for so far. If you have experience with trading systems, solana, 'smart contracts', cryptography, or web3 maybe shoot an email to offpisteprotocol@protonmail.com or DM the twitter account https://twitter.com/cypher_protocol.

I think this company would be a good place to work for just about anyone. You will need to be curious and self-motivated to get a job there. Consider applying if you're a reasonably skilled technical person.

I have been at Shopify 1.25 years and really enjoyed it. It’s a very engineering centric organization that is both ambitious and kind. While at the same time wanting to push the boundaries of commerce (and attracting people that want to push those boundaries) they also work to reinforce constantly work life balance, stepping away from work, and so on.

I've been having a great time at Apple. I joined a bit over two years ago (coming from a 7.5-year-long stint at google). The people are great, the work is very interesting. Highly recommended.

Google used to be a non-sucky place to work, but from what I hear from friends still there, it's not at all like it was in 2012

The right place in the public sector (govt', academia etc), can be awesome. If the place has an important mission, that'll attract intelligent idealistic people, who make very nice colleagues. If you get to work on up to date (or in some cases actually ahead of the game e:g open source that's not yet widely used) tech, while sufficiently relaxed environment that you've time to learn properly and retain those skills, that's really good long-term career value. Of course, headline salary is likely to be lower than private sector. But you might get a final salary pension, other perks, career might last longer if you avoid burnout. Having done both, I give big thumbs up to public sector. Even the not so good parts, if its a beaurocratic hole that can be a great chance to sort it out, quite fulfilling to fix messes...

Unfortunately, I don't have a recommendation.

But I have a suggestion for the community – could we make this a monthly thing? A "Who's not sucky to work for" thread on the 3rd of every month might be interesting and help us understand the complex reality of employer versus employee preferences.

Hey! Don't diss the Transylvanian team!

Aptible:

  - Only ~15 employees
  - Profitable
  - Fully distributed team
  - Great work/life balance
  - CEO is one of the best software engineers I’ve worked with
  - Interesting problems (building a security-focused PaaS)
  - We are hiring

I worked at Apple and Intuit and were all great for me to work at, but both also had teams that were not great.

When I interview I make sure the interview is for a specific team with a specific manager and that the interview is with the manager or someone else directly on the team I will be working with. I've had to request and it hasn't been a problem yet.

> Management don't know what they want the product to be. Project managers don't know anything about technology.

Spicy take: These are things you should get used to if you are want to be a great engineer. You'll get varying degrees of this everywhere depending on your own personal views and knowledge.

Come work with me at nCino! We’re a Banking SaaS company based on Salesforce and AWS . Wait don’t stop reading yet! We’re working on a ton of neat products for banks and everyone I’ve ever worked with here is top notch! I can’t think of one person I have worked with that I wouldn’t want to work with again. nCino treats it’s employees very well from your first day here you’re part of the team, generous pay, benefits, and they’re always flexible. In short if you want to work with great people at the top of their game who will help you get to the top of your game, in a great environment email me!

I’ve worked at Tyler Technologies for over eleven years and love it. You won’t make high TC you can make at FAANG firms. However, you can build software that helps local government and municipalities. I feel like my work is valuable and helps contribute to a better world. I work on 911 software for dispatch centers and first responders. Tyler also has a large courts, education, and appraisal and tax prescience. We’re also growing into the Federal market. If you want to make government better, it may be worth checking out.

Yourself. 13 years, 14 in December, as freelancer, I get to work directly with people who have problems, my software really helps them instead of being an internal tool that will get reinvented in 5 years at big corporations. I choose my own projects, I am constantly learning in different industries, meeting (both virtually and in person) people from all 5 continents and while the pay is great my biggest motivator is that I can spend time with my family and raise my own kids. I do realize I'm one of the lucky few.

Yourself? Not to be snarky but whenever there is someone with another interest in play, conflict can arise.

Worst job I have ever had was easily the Marines.

It took me 20 years to get out.

Yourself

Being your own boss is freakin' awesome. I'll never go back.

Remote(.com)

I've only been here for ~6 months but it's been one of the most incredible places to work at for me.

Everyone is kind (kindness is a core value), proactive and helpful. People take real time off in which they are unreachable (even the CEO & CTO), taking more time off is highly and really encouraged.

I get a lot of Ownership (another value) over what I do and how I do it - I do a lot of stuff that's not connected to my team at all, I criticise the way we do things and well... it's highly appreciated and my opinion is valued and we actually change things.

I just had my first performance review with my manager and what he put as the highlight of my last 6 months is a post I made about how people should not work over hours and take vacation.

This culture has utterly fascinated me. I've been at places where they said they had these values but really didn't, so far either remote is tremendous at faking me out or it's really that great. Which to be honest I'm still sometimes skeptical about as it can't be that good ;)

Oh. And yeah on the side I work fully remotely still have a great connection to my colleagues and we work on something important that helps workers and companies that I actually care about.

There are very few companies (and sometimes few teams in large companies) who are driven to actually produce something better.

Typically, these companies are startups/midsize pre-ipo companies that are determined to reach somewhere. Until the product(s) are well established, the engineering there is highly regarded - but often loaded with tech debt.

Once the product is well established, it becomes a game of meetings where everyone just looks after their own self.

Big companies can be good or bad depending on which team you are part of. Also, your relationship with your manager ultimately decides your fate in most cases.

I work for ITHAKA (parent of jstor.org) and I think they are decidedly non-suckey: https://www.ithaka.org/

- Great benefits

- Very transparent leadership

- Nonprofit (501c3) - long-term sustainability of the org & product are major goals which (IMO) makes for much better project/team/personal incentives

- Remote work for any position, but also offices in Ann Arbor, NYC, and Princeton

- Education-oriented mission

I’ve worked for a bunch of startups that have been acquired:

VMware: really bad, upper management ruins everything

Oracle: where dreams go to die

Rackspace: hands down the worst company I’ve ever seen

I'm trying to imagine an ideal day at work for myself and then during the interview process I ask questions to understand how far it's going to be from that ideal day working in this company.

I ask about meetings and their durations, performance reviews, bureaucracy levels, project management software, spyware used by the employer, the number of lines of code, and other potential red flags.

Keep in mind that at any large company people's experiences will vary from team to team. I can read reviews about my job where people make it out to be the worst place on earth. Yet I think it's quite cushy and don't really have anything bad to say about it.

There's rarely going to be one company that is great to work for all around unless they're small to medium sized.

I'm obviously biased, but my company, Rising Team, is a great place to work.

Our product helps managers understand and care about their team members. We envision a world where everyone in the workforce is deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals. We live this vision and of course we eat our own dogfood.

Personally, I believe in the power of transparency and honesty. If something is off, even just a little bit, we should discuss it. If we're not both winning, something is not working and we need to work to fix it.

I'm nowhere near perfect and I've messed up before as a manager and I will continue to mess up. But in the end even my messups work out, sometimes even better actually, because we communicate with each other and we care about each other.

We're currently hiring a senior software engineer and a PM. You can check it out at https://risingteam.com/careers

Feel free to ask me anything, especially if there's something you're skeptical of.

i'm enjoying my time at VMware (in the MAPBU org, i.e., the one doing all of the Kubernetes stuff). the benefits are great, compensation is great, everyone is wicked smart, leadership are engineers and/or scientists (mostly), and we're building things that the company is deeply invested in

generally, i've enjoyed my time the most at startups or small consultancies

Oooh, oooh! I know!

It will be an employer that's not pushing lame woke initiatives. Those pretty quickly divide the workforce and lead to a witch-hunt environment.

Look for a good, solid workplace that sticks to good business principles while quietly treating a diverse workforce with respect. (In other words, they walk the walk instead of talking the talk.) That'll bring you happiness.

I don't think you can make a judgement about a company. I think its really about the team and manager.

My first team at twitter was horrible, from the team members to managers, toxic and stressful. I was stuck doing after hours work, and oncall was miserable with constant off hours pages and no one had desire to do something about it.It was terrible for my mental health. I couldn't wait to leave. I switched teams and it was like joining a new company, unbelievable. People respected my opinion, no one was an asshole, everyone was polite and friendly. There's constant stupid shit going on with the directors and vps, doing reorgs or w/e trying to justify their existence i guess but none of that effects me. Plenty of of coworkers and friends at work have had similar experience. Some teams are truly hellish nightmares and some are great.

I'm really enjoying my first 4 months at Two Sigma as a senior SRE with promises of movement into the management track.

Nearly everyone is extremely highly skilled. It's not like most past jobs where a handful of people are highly talented. Here most people are extremely proficient.

And then there's a culture of healthy boundaries and communication styles.

I thought that being a quant (using computers to selectively buy and sell financial securities) they would work us to death but the typical work week is at or below 40 hours. And starting at the VP level netted me over a month of vacation.

Their hiring process is a bit much and quite slow. They took almost 4 months to hire me. But typical is about a month from initial contact to offer.

Maybe consider Two Sigma. We need smart, professional individuals.

I did work for a dozen of companies during my career, I can definitely say that the last one I joined, Remote, is the best workplace in the world (at least one of the bests). I tried hard to think about something more that I can ask for, but couldn't come up with. I have:

- Freedom to chose the schedules that suits my personal needs

- Unlimited PTO

- Kindness is in our DNA, from CEO to the last junior joiner, and any management layer in between. I've never seen that much kindness in any company before

- Time + yearly budget for learning

- Competitive salary + stock options

- Amazing and very talented coworkers to learn from

- Great business with huge impact in the world

I did think about what could make me leave Remote, I found only two reasons :

- I want to start my own company (Where I'll do my best to replicate the same values and environment)

- They fired me :D

I've worked at startups, Microsoft (Ballmer days), Google, eBay, and back at Microsoft (Satya days). eBay was nice but not great infrastructure. Google had great infrastructure but was like a headless chicken, and after a while having that much autonomy and lack of leadership and vision gets old. Microsoft is slower, more staid, more hierarchical and incremental (and the focus on enterprise customers means that won't change), but has good leadership who show genuine care for the workforce, and knows how to execute, day in and day out. And the scope of what Microsoft does means you should never be bored. I'd recommend eBay and Google as good places to work, but Microsoft is a great place to work.

Surprisingly, Microsoft is pretty damn good these days.

I recently left DuckDuckGo (personal reasons) and would recommend it as an ethical but growth-oriented place to work. Lovely bunch of people with aligned values, a clear company strategy, and respect for individual freedom and personal situations.

If you're looking for remote work (UK/EU) I can highly recommend my employer, Prolific. A business run with compassion as a fundamental. I've never enjoyed my work more. Drop me a message if you'd like to talk more.

I think all jobs suck in some way or another. The best approach in my opinion is to not worry too much about it, work just the required 8 daily hours and try to enjoy life outside of work.

If you feel you are not getting good enough raises, just look for another job. The market is hot atm.

If the codebase is that bad and the offshore team is making it worse, see my last paragraph. Honestly I've many times considered quitting because of an awful code base

If you really like/enjoy programming and feel bad because in the job you can't program the way you want then make your own side projects, they don't need to be for profit.

When I worked there a few years ago, Xero was a pretty stellar employer. Lots of really lovely people, lots of opportunity to explore different avenues in your career, and active attention paid to employee wellbeing.

Expedia has treated me well and has been great for me and my career, but I think with huge orgs like that, it varies wildly depending on the team, even in the same location.

I like my team because we're:

(actually) diverse

extremely progressive with tech (eg Kotlin + Arrow and sane frameworks instead of 90s style run of the mill Java with Spring) and always open to trying out new things and tech

comp, benefits, work life balance and remote opportunities are excellent

last but not least, everyone is super friendly and encouraging, with zero tolerance for toxic tech-bro attitudes

I'm in Brisbane, Australia =)

For my skillset, there's tons of jobs in industries like entertainment, finance, insurance, tech B2B, advertising, private sector contracting, chemical manufacturing, gambling, etc. I'm really sick of my labor going towards turning people into consumer zombies, making the rich richer, or otherwise exploiting people or nature.

How do you find a tech job where you know your labor is actually having a positive impact on humanity? It feels like they're not hiring. Maybe the problem is just working in tech.

Primer.io has been quite nice so far. I’m writing this from one of our twice yearly workcations in Tenerife. Our fully remote has gotten together in an Airbnb, basically all expenses paid for to chill work and have fun together.

The product is very interesting and innovative. The teams are well organized and quite self sufficient. And there are huge challenges to overcome in every aspect of the company. Anywhere you look there is something you can do to make it better.

In Norway you could do worse than working for Entur (I'm work as a consultant there and they are amazing, they are hiring, but I prefer being a consultant.)

Edit after rereading: since you ask were we work, self promotion seems to be OK with you. I work in Computas. We are employee owned and in 4.5 years I have not had to deal with a single jerk. That feels quite amazing given what I'm used to.

Live somewhere for a long time and in a close knit community. Eventually you hear through word of mouth long before you even consider applying.

Australia focused, but Canva is the best place I've ever worked. Varied engineering challenges, upper management and product managers respect engineering decisions. Smart coworkers, great perks, the office (optional) is the best. Metrics are hockey sticking so it's exciting being part of something big in a country where that is rare. No brilliant jerks is my favourite.

Check out Noom. Super nice people, strong ethics and mission and a focus on employee satisfaction. Bonus points: parabolic growth trajectory.

Google

As a developer: Transloadit. Profitable. No investors looking to twist arms to make short term gains. Founders are in it for the long haul and developers so there’s appreciation and time made available to refactor and write tests. Small team, large footprint. Remote. Open. 80% of resources are spent on open source. Disclosure: founder.

I’ve spent 20 years working for a non-tech Fortune 500 company. Frankly I’ve loved my job the entire time. Excellent pay and benefits, chill managers, fun coworkers, beautiful campus (back when we worked on campus in the before times ;-), interesting projects, given time to learn new skills, amazing work-life balance, etc.

Microsoft azure edge platform. There is so much work to do and you never get bored. Humble coworkers generally. Slow paced but you can work on many things in parallel to avoid waiting.

If you live in Wisconsin, I highly recommend northwestern mutual which is a life insurance/financial company.

> Project managers don't know anything about technology. There's an offshore team in Traansylvania busy making it a legacy codebase. They don't want to give developers raises...

These are all signs it's a company that happens to be doing tech instead of a tech company.

The flip side of "management don't know what they want the product to be" is "management decided what the product should be 3 years ago and won't adjust to the current reality, even though the company is failing." Be careful what you ask for.

I've never gone out of my way to try and get my friends to apply as I have for Ably Realtime(PaaS startup) I joined in the pandemic lockdown, and they just rolled with it. When things eased, all of the flexibility stayed. Best place I've worked as a parent.

Apiture.

Fintech startup. Tech stack's recent. People are genuinely good and capable humans. Based out of North Carolina with an office in Austin, but 100% remote.

Truly awesome benefits.

I'm on the platform engineering team.

And yes, Apiture's hiring. Let me know if you want to apply - pretty sweet referral bonuses, haha.

Well I just tried to use glassdoor to try and grasp how it is to work at apple as a software engineer. Glassdoor is terrible. I think there is a business opportunity here. Make a site just for developers. Hackerdoors or something.

Biased but I've been at ClassPass for 6.5 years for a reason. Everyone has such great attitudes and work life balance is really excellent.

As someone working in the backend I'm super stoked to be able to work with Kotlin in our services.

Have you considered that you might be unemployable? Don’t take it the wrong way. It’s a common trait of startup founders. A big part of their motivation is often that they don’t want to go back to working for other people.

county libraries.

This question is a Catch-22…

I know a Mexican, who knew that his way out, was by getting in somewhere better. He applied to a German University, with zero experience with the German language. But on the application he lied and marked 'Conversational fluency'… he was accepted, leveraged his new location, and since has been the 1st CTO of multiple companies.

The people who have a little bit of humble audacity & spontaneous enthusiasm, will find a way, and gravitate towards each other.

The problem with this question, is trying to avoid companies that "don't suck"… instead, the aim is to find an amazing company. (Some readers will shrug off this distinction, and the successful will have an 'A-ha!' moment) Because amazing companies filter out average people who are only trying to avoid non-suckiness.

Amazing companies hire amazing people.

Targeting Transylvania as a home of shitty offshore teams is in poor taste.

Home Depot IT, surprisingly enough.

Out of all the companies I've worked at, it was a surprisingly refreshing experience. I didn't know a company could be that big and that entrepreneurial at the same time.

I work at Mercury Banking Solutions, and I've loved my time there. Everyone is whip-smart and helpful. I both feel like I'm playing up, but also get the support to rise to the challenge.

Atlassian has amazing work/life balance and lots of very smart people who are happy to share knowledge with you and are easy to talk to. Pay and benefits are holistic and competitive

PDFTron in Vancouver is alright. I didn't vibe with my manager or the rest of my immediate team well, but the rest of the company is alright with not much bureaucracy and some smart people working on a niche product. I burnt out in part because they had me do customer support while trying to deliver features, so I was terminated, but they're still alright if they can figure that out. I have ADHD and my manager didn't seem to understand how I couldn't get back to people on time, so I quickly learnt to resent coming into work.

Consider working for yourself under a corporation. Quick to be hired, fired, and fire your customers. You may be the best boss you've ever had.

Haven’t seen this mentioned in the top comments:

How’s your network ? Usually that’s a good way to go - find someone you enjoyed working with and see were they are

Anybody here from Workday? Their online presence is very pro-employee but I'd like to confirm it from someone inside.

For me it’s hard to find a company wich has a cause I want to fight for.

Most of the companies do meaningless things (from my perspective).

Might depend on your country but federal government. Good pay, job security and a clear path for career progression.

I've heard OpenTHC is pretty cool ;)

Not Microsoft

RStudio. I've been shocked at how healthy, happy, and friendly their culture has been.

Personally I look for small or startup type companies. I’ve learned that VC backed companies are usually cut throat and not creative. You will get paid more, but there is a cost to that. It’s a numbers game with VC backed companies. Burn and churn. Large companies it’s hard to add value. I worked at Salesforce for about a year before I quit. One of the best companies I ever worked at as far as perks go.

I also don’t have a college degree but have the experience to back me up. I’ve noticed at organizations where they hire fresh out of college or bootcamps is just a bunch of people that would rather talk computer science than write code that can be read in the future.

The best companies are hard to find gems that look like shit from the outside. For example, one company I worked for would dispute every Glassdoor review that wasn’t a 5 star saying it was a disgruntled former employee. It was a highly toxic company with amazing reviews on Glassdoor. Compare that with the company I’m at today that has just over a 3 stars.

The best companies that aren’t complete shit will empower you and encourage you to be your best. They understand they hire for your expertise and get the fuck out of your way. They demand results and also realize that results can take time. Not many people are able to work in this type of environment. You’re essentially looking for a company who treats employees like a team. Just like any professional sports team, the worst players are cut. However, the company also understands balance and sees excessive working as a problem. You’re looking for a company where the one doing the hiring is looking for someone smarter than they are.

In my opinion, the best way would be to read the reviews, and I mean really read the reviews you find online. Why are people saying what they say? Are they new hire reviews? Research the executive team and anyone else you can find at the company on LinkedIn. Before you go to any interview do research on the company and come prepared with questions you want answered based on your findings. Ask the company why you should work for them without being direct. Try talking to others who work there and get a feel for their personalities. If you smoke, go find where the smokers are and start conversations with them. If you get an offer, negotiate a contact for 90 days. During those 90 days, you want to keep interviewing the company. How’s the onboarding? Are they setting you up for success? Is there politics? Are there any assholes? Look for any red flags. There might be warning flags but the point is, you both are testing each other out.

Every company will have its pros and cons. I’ve decided to work at smaller companies which pay a little less but I have more opportunities to learn and grow vs a larger company where I’m a one trick pony.

I currently work at project44 and it's really nice here!

GoDaddy and Dell are both excellent places to work.

In my experience, there's no substitute for putting in the hours of painstaking research: scouring job boards and sites like levels.fyi for companies you haven't heard of yet, exploring their websites, looking at the professional profiles and blogs of the employees, etc. Every once in a long while, you find something really legit - places like Brilliant, McMaster-Carr, Bitwise Alchemy. IMO the better the place the more likely it is to be somewhat under the radar

Perhaps someone can write a review-website for jobs.

Currently working at project44 and love it here!

elastic

Whoever pays the most. At some point most of us get inspired by WuTang and take the "Cash Rules Everything Around Me" mentality. Work is where we trade our bodies and our limited lifespan for money 8-12 hours per day. I personally just shut my brain off or detach completely, get my work done, then get back to my life.

Whoever pays the most sucks less. Otherwise, all things being equal, all companies are going to suck, especially if you work for yourself.

Who doesn't force drugs on their employees?

Stripe comes to mind. I haven't worked there so I don't actually know.