Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?

[bwb]

I'd love to know what everyone is doing to scope out a workplace before they take a job there.

Do you email people who work there?

Do you just jump in and hope for the best?

Are there apps or sites you like?

[motohagiography]

Crunchbase to get current and former founders/execs, last rounds etc. Company website for investor relations page if exists, SEC and regulatory filings to get financials, technology roadmaps, prospectuses, etc. Then avoid pinging anyone on linkedin other than to find who the core informal network that runs the company is.

Find out:

1. Revenue and runway before next funding round or profitability. This trumps all in product decisions. Long runway means they can invest in new platforms and techs with bet on huge growth. Short runway means getting prestige brands into the sales pipeline to woo next investment round, and leveraging technical debt to survive. Would argue tech debt burden can be estimated as a function of remaining runway.

2. Whether board members and executives still have skin in the game and holding their stock. If board is full of early shareholders who have already been made whole, chances are you aren't their next unicorn, there is no explosive growth, and they've checked out. Expect executive level bullshit politics related to their short term compensation milestones.

3. Informal network: Who went to school with/worked with whom, and whether this role will-be / needs-to-be in that fold, or out of it. If you are not in the fold, you are a dilution target, and someones tool for meeting executive compensation milestones before changing the world. Do the work and take the money, but keep your dreams in check.

IMHO, these factors are what determine the company culture.

If the company is private, check out the other companies in the lead VCs portfolio web pages and what kinds of cultures those companies have. People move between them and you can get a better data set for glassdoor searches. If the other companies suck, this one probably will too.

What makes a company a great place to work is its real opportunity for growth because that means people are growing with it, and that brings them into work everyday. This creates a trajectory that defines its culture.

Good luck.

[craz8]

I just looked at the Crunchbase entry for my current company

It’s terrible

Actually, it’s worse than terrible

The revenue is several years old, the technology is wrong, the employees listed is laughable (except the founders)

From the info I do know, I wouldn’t trust the info I don’t know on that site

Since their data is so bad, I’m going to throw out some bad info too: if a company has less that 5,000 people, don’t look at Crunchbase

[kelvin0]

Is this advice for employees? Or VC's? I've NEVER had to do this for any of the jobs in my 20+ years as a software developer ... but there are some interesting points indeed.

[simonebrunozzi]

All this due diligence for a job? Not sure it's the right approach. I would look for other signals, and in general for a good contract and comp package, among other things. What you are proposing is beyond the scope of a normal employee in most cases.

[jotato]

>2. Whether board members and executives still have skin in the game and holding their stock. If board is full of early shareholders who have already been made whole, chances are you aren't their next unicorn, there is no explosive growth, and they've checked out. Expect executive level bullshit politics related to their short term compensation milestones.

Can you elaborate on that?

[curiousfiddler]

Thanks, the points you make are very important.

Specifically, on "... executive level bullshit politics related to their short term compensation milestones ...", I would like to add, this one is the hardest to figure out and has a significant impact on your growth not just within the company, but as a person in general.

Any more suggestions, on good ways to find out if this is part of the company culture?

[theNJR]

Great advice here, thanks.

[lynnetye]

If you're a software engineer (or will work closely w/ engineers), I built Key Values (https://www.keyvalues.com) to help w/ this.

Before building KV though, my research process included looking for and reading:

- the company's career and about us pages

- an active blog w/ recent posts (w/in the last 2 months)

- LinkedIn / Twitter / GitHub of founders and existing team members (I'd also look for any old blogs written by (or press written about) these folks before they joined the company)

- checking to see if the company hosts meetups or hackathons I can attend

- seeing if I know anyone who currently works there or worked there before and then reaching out

- cold emailing or Tweeting current team members

[OJFord]

Nice idea, but I'm very confused what I'm doing or how it works - it starts with non-zero matches, and then for each thing I click it _increases_ the number of matches...

I'd expect it to start large, and then filter down with more things selected. But it's not even like it's acting the other way, including only companies that match at least one thing I clicked, because it started non-zero.

[rajacombinator]

This site looks nice but a question and couple suggestions for you.

Question: why not include a "high compensation"/"high equity"/"top of market comp"/etc category? Talk about culture and values is nice but as far as I'm concerned the best way for companies to show they care about engineers is to put their money where their mouth is. There's surely a subset of engineers and companies that agree with me on this. It would be useful for matching.

Suggestions: if you're not doing this already, you should limit the number of categories a company or user can select. (And if you are doing this, you should make it clear on the site.) This will help get more meaningful results. Some of the current categories are meaningless - ie. "Impressive team members" ... what company would not claim this? It's only meaningful if you restrict them to, say, 5 categories. Either do this or just eliminate these categories and keep it on pure culture traits like "eats lunch together."

[lynnetye]

Oh, and depending on the company and their product/service, I'd also look at their other social media accounts. For example, some have active Instagram and/or YouTube accounts which can be incredibly insightful.

Ps. One lesson I've learned: never judge a company based on their marketing website.

[myroon5]

Have you considered adding parameters to the end of the url so selections can be saved and shared?

[wpmoradi]

Thanks for building this! I will definitely use your site when scouting for my next role.

[curiousfiddler]

Lynne, KV is a great tool! Thanks a lot for that. If you find time, would love to see -ve metrics as well. That would cover both aspects of a job search: what am I looking for, and what am I looking to avoid.

[jaegerpicker]

Maybe I missed the feature but is there a way to search for companies by name over than `crtl+f`? Not a huge deal but might be nice if you researching a potential job found on another site.

[tasubotadas]

I found it a bit strange that adding more criteria, it matches more companies. What kind of method do you use for filtering?

[def_true_false]

It would be great if you could filter for the lack of (or the opposite of) some value... e.g. flat organization.

[moonka]

Key Values is a very cool idea! Have you thought about adding a location filter?

[jotato]

bookmarked. Will use in the future. I love the simplistic UX.

[mattrp]

Really cool website - thank you!

[akulkarni7]

how do you determine the key values for each company?

[Rooster61]

Used to use Glassdoor, but it has become progressively more rude/pay-walled over the years, and they allow more paid employer astroturfing than they used to.

I suppose that's just a sign of the times, and I don't necessarily have a grudge against the company for doing so. It does however mean that the site is no longer useful to this end, at least for me.

As for directly contacting a company, I tend not to. Sometimes this works out, other times not. I thought I would hate my current job and thought I was quite unqualified, but it turned out to be pretty fantastic. Just going with the flow sometimes works out that way.

[devrod]

It seems pretty obvious that something is off when a company has 50/50 good and bad reviews, with the bad ones offering a ton of detail, and the good ones way too positive and overly "corporate" with no detail.

[halbritt]

Glassdoor is still useful in the sense that you can filter down to the worse reviews. Ignore those that are obviously sour grapes, and get a sense of how bad things are. I see a lot of things like:

Positive Reviewer - "Hypergrowth company! Lots of opportunties, great culture!!!!"

Negative reviewer - "They hired too fast, have no clue what they're doing, and have lots of free food and ping pong."

[Gonzih]

I saw some time ago that companies were dropping negative reviews by changing company name on glassdoor

[ddebernardy]

> Do you email people who work there?

No. They'll rarely tell you anything useful because they'd risk their job.

Focus on former employees instead if you really must. (And only stick to recent ones if you do, because companies change.) But IMHO you don't actually need to do this nowadays.

> Do you just jump in and hope for the best?

Absolutely not.

At the very least check out their website, their execs, and your future boss. Google whoever you think is relevant and check their respective LinkedIn profiles, blogs, social media, etc.

Even more importantly, pay attention to any hints of company culture or technical red flags during interviews. Ask soft questions as you run into them to keep the interview process flowing; and dig deeper when you're in the negotiation phase.

> Are there apps or sites you like?

Glassdoor was interesting in the past. It still is, but there's a strong sampling bias and a lot of astroturfing. IMHO it's mostly useful to check for recurring, obvious red flags. YMMV.

CrunchBase is sort of useful to get funding data -- when it's accurate. (IMHO you're better off asking this type of data point blank during the interviews.) The important bit here is how they'll approach things like risk taking and technical debt, as already noted in an excellent sibling answer.

AngelList and LinkedIn are useful to get a feel of who the execs and your future boss are. Personally I wouldn't touch a company whose exec team is all 20-somethings with a 10-foot poll. Some youngsters are brilliant but I'd rather see a few adults in the room too. But that's just me...

Google is the most useful tool overall. You'll sometimes be surprised by what comes up when you google some exec's name and go through a few results pages or their social media accounts.

---

Last point: don't underestimate the value of this research. If you're going to move to some new location and/or change jobs thinking you're going to stay there for more than a few months, take an afternoon to do this research to avoid getting ugly surprises.

[souprock]

I think there is some sort of anti-astroturfing on glassdoor. The salary that they have for us is absurd. It's something like the starting pay at In-N-Out or Chick-Fil-A, for an experienced and specialized software job.

I wonder where that comes from. Perhaps it is from Glassdoor itself, trying to force companies to enter into some sort of business arrangement to correct the nonsense. Perhaps competitors are trying to make us look awful. I'd like to think that the culprit overplayed their hand, and that everybody will disregard the nonsense, but probably some people believe it.

[sailfast]

Point of clarification here: emailing friends or former colleagues that work somewhere is a great idea. Ask them what they think. If they're in town, have coffee with them. They will provide you an honest assessment.

You may also be able to network to someone that works there to get their impressions of the place. Like most job-related things, networking is critical.

[zerkten]

> Last point: don't underestimate the value of this research. If you're going to move to some new location and/or change jobs thinking you're going to stay there for more than a few months, take an afternoon to do this research to avoid getting ugly surprises.

I didn't see this posted elsewhere. Before researching a company or role I try to note down what I want. As I research, or talk to different folks about roles, my perspective can sometimes change. It's good to be able to come back to your core reasons for investigating the role.

Once you've done the research try to map out the possible trajectories for you from that point (if the company is acquired by market leader that you hate, if they turn out to not be some happy with remote work, etc.) This doesn't take long, but feel like I've seen so many people in my almost 20 years of work life leave me thinking "that was obvious" after a sad conversation.

[itamarst]

You can (sometimes) use GitHub to figure out if the company has bad work/life balance, e.g. if you see lots of employees committing code on the weekend on the same dates: https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/01/31/does-company-have-wo...

[bauerd]

You'd just end up mistaking commits to my private repositories for work. Also, private contributions have to be enabled in order to show up there.

[galazzah]

https://levels.fyi to make sure the level/comp accurately represents what i'm looking for

[godot]

The question is a bit weird to me because the things you suggest seem like what you would do before you even apply. But when you say "before they take a job there", it seems to imply after the interview, and offer on hand.

When you're interviewing, you're not just letting the employer assess you; you're also assessing the company and the team. You should be asking questions about working there. There's no need to "email people who work there" to ask because you should be asking them during the interview!

My current job is the first time (out of 6 jobs over 14 years) where I am joining a company without anyone I know there -- as in, I responded to a recruiter pinging me, interviewed, and got an offer. I didn't have a friend refer me or anything. It was a risky leap, and made more risky by the fact that it's fully remote (my first remote job), so I had no idea if it was going to be like everyone being overworked, or feeling completely disconnected, or anything. One thing I did that may have appeared weird but was worth doing was, after getting an offer, I asked to speak with yet one more engineer on the team, in a sort of reverse-interview. I extensively asked about working there.

Like someone said, because people don't want to risk their jobs, most of the time they won't say anything negative in such a scenario. But as long as you learn to read between the lines, you can still get useful information out of it.

On the other hand if this is before you interview, none of this matters. Just go interview and decide from there.

[gxs]

I work at a company of 10.5k employees.

Even considering global offices, there are ~5k employees here on campus.

The problem is that every single team, organization, every executive and the functions that roll up to them, are of course different.

The best advice is what others have said here: go into the interviews bright eyed and try as hard to get a sense of the people who interview.

Are they good people? Is there a good mix of people who are task oriented vs relationship oriented?

At the end of the day, looking at things like Glassdoor, LinkedIn, will only give you a very high level picture so the interviews are your best bet.

Also, if you're anything like me, I value money quite a bit over other conditions, so asking about salary up front is a must.

[new_here]

Glassdoor, company engineering blog and careers page on their website to see what the environment, tech stack and benefits are like. Maybe Stackshare.

[howard941]

Next time I will scour online maps to make sure that the engineering spaces aren't within a warehouse no matter how nice they are. The forklift horns honking and beeping drives me to distraction.

[JohnFen]

Here's the core of what I do:

I pore over their website, and do web searches on the company and the company's top executives. If I don't personally know anyone who works for (or used to work for) them, then I hit up my professional contacts to see if I can find someone who does. I then ask those people about their day-to-day experience at the company. I make sure to ask, at a minimum, both what they consider great about working there and what they consider awful about it.

What I'm looking for is a good fit -- does the company operate in a way that works for me? Do I feel good about what the company produces and how they do business? Are the employees generally satisfied? That sort of thing.

One thing I would never do unless I were in a crisis of some sort is to just jump in and hope for the best. It's too easy for that to go horribly wrong.

[Chloro]

You make it sound like it a marriage or something. If you don't like it you can always leave. That's worked for me so far.

[fierro]

Most of the other comments here cover the majority of useful tips/techniques.

However for me, one thing I really like doing is reaching out to employees who quit/left. Ask them for honest information about why they quit and what the existing problems are.

[mlthoughts2018]

Every job I’ve had in the past 15 years has had exactly the same office workspace:

- horrid open plan layout with no quiet or privacy.

- comically stupid budget wasted on boutique cafeteria and presentation spaces, catered lunches, coffee, snacks.

- corporate slogans and motivational gimmicks painted on the walls.

Why do you need to research office space for a new job? It’s always exactly the same.

[softawre]

Because there are still good developer jobs out there that give developers offices if they want? That seems to be to be a great reason to do your research.

PS: if you're in Indy I am hiring, you will get an office.

[tootie]

When you are interviewing, make sure you go to the bathroom. Bathroom quality is key indicator of how a company values it's employees.

[khorpy]

In our local IT community chat, we have a funny tradition of posting bathroom review videos from different IT companies. From what I've seen, turns out that your assumption is totally true.

[troydavis]

Here's a few ways to get a peek at a company's culture, particularly how they interact with customers and how customers perceive them:

1. The company's responses to public issues/tickets/discussions (on GitHub issues/pull requests, a support forum, whatever). Do employees provide thoughtful replies or frustrating form letters ("Great idea! Please vote for your feature request here:")? Is the person responding actually qualified to answer? Where appropriate, does the individual's personality come through or does the reply feel perfunctory or rushed? Do issues ever get closed, and when they do, is a useful explanation provided?

2. Twitter interactions between the company and users. Search Twitter for "to:companyname" for replies and "@companyname" for all mentions. Depending on the company, searching Reddit for the company or product name(s) may also turn up interactions.

3. Search engine keyword research/planner tools. What other words/phrases are used alongside the company or product name? Google and Bing both now restrict their tools, but many third-party planners are public and some include things like inbound link pages. (For a less-complete view, check which phrases are autocompleted in Google and Bing's search form input fields.)

[fro0116]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned AngelList yet. Well, that's not quite true. I saw a few mentions of AngelList itself but nothing about what I feel is their killer feature for job searching: their salaries tool https://angel.co/salaries

Job posts there usually come with a salary range, and salary can be a deal-breaker for a lot of people (most people?), so seeing salary ranges up front for specific companies & positions you're interested in can help avoid a lot of wasted time on both sides due to mismatch in expectations around compensation.

The tool is even more helpful when you're in that initial stage of looking for work but not sure where to apply to yet, because you can filter for jobs that match a certain salary range, within certain locations/industries, level of funding, tech choices, etc.

I also personally really like job searching platforms like Hired.com, Underdog.io, Triplebyte, and AngelList's own A-List that allow you to apply once to their platform and then have companies come to you with offers for interviews, many of which of also require the company to disclose salary range up front so you can decide which offers are worth your time to pursue.

[jb3689]

Crunchbase to understand the company's funding

Github to see if they have open source stuff

Company blogs

I've told companies I want to remeet the team after interviews and they've scheduled lunches for me to talk with them in a more low pressure situation

[fierro]

those lunches/coffees are critical

[chucksmash]

When I was interviewing a few years ago, one of the interviewers I spoke with mentioned they'd used Mattermark[0] to prospect for companies they might be interested in applying to. That seemed like a novel idea given it seems to be targetted primarily towards investors.

[0]: https://mattermark.com/

[coffeemug]

One piece of advice I heard recently that in hindsight is extremely important -- look around the company and see if there are people who look like you in positions similar to the one you're expecting to get. If there aren't, you're probably not getting the position you think you're getting.

[tlavoie]

Various OSInt (open source intelligence) tools can be handy, just as they are on a pen-test.

Besides the usual stuff linked to on the site, you can look for email addresses from their domain(s), Google-dork for file extensions on their site and so on.

Often email addresses are tied to discussion forums and such, though perhaps more of that is Github these days.

One tool (forget the name at the moment) would let you look for social media posts/pics in a radius to a given location, so see what pops up nearby the office. If not from the company, might still be informative of the neighbourhood.