I once interviewed with a company that brought me into a new, shiny, well-appointed building on the corporate campus for an interview.
I did well answering their questions. And they answered my usual questions correctly. Stuff like "Can developers here choose their own tools?" and "My title is going to be Lead Engineer, will I actually be a Lead Engineer?"
After I was hired, I found out everybody uses Eclipse, no exceptions, and I was absolutely not going to be leading anything (I was basically going to be used like an overpaid junior engineer).
The best part: "Oh, you won't be working in the new building..." and was taken to an old, windowless, leaky, mold-smelling building with peeling paint and flickering fluorescent lights (think the opening scene from "Joe vs the Volcano"). My office was a supply closet that was being converted into an office (by that I mean, "we just pulled most of the stuff out of here, but otherwise just rearrange the furniture however.") I was given an old 70s vintage desk that was too low, a sort-of broken chair, and a laptop and left to my own devices for three weeks while waiting for my new project to get started. Then I was suddenly moved to even worse accommodations - a cubicle, which belonged to an employee who had recently died (his stuff was still there, and it was a month before anyone came to take it away).
I started looking for a new job about 2 days in. Took me a year to find something else (I eventually had to move to a new city).
At first, I was like, it's crazy that this company did this. And then as I was reading through the description, I realized this actually happened to me. It wasn't identical, but there are similarities.
First, the project was described as "green-field, we're doing cool stuff writing MVC apps from the ground up." I was assigned to build SSRS reports.
Second, the shiny building with the sales people, recruiters, executives - I did work there, on a second or third floor, corner office with windows! For about a week. Then I was moved a mile down the road to the building they got through an acquisition. I was on the ground level (I think?) and I had a whole office! But the office was small, dark brown and had no windows. Even the door was solid dark brown. (The office wasn't all that old or terrible - the kitchen was kind of awesome. But the actual area where I worked was pretty dreadful.)
I don't exactly feel like it was intentional, or at least, it didn't occur to me at the time. But looking back, of course they didn't want to highlight that they really wanted someone to grind through reports. And they clearly didn't intend for me to spend my time occupying a corner office with windows!
I worked at a place that had decided to increase office space in an unusual way. They once had done their own power generation with an oil boiler and had a very large underground concrete oil bunker. They eventually tore down the power plant and "cleaned" out the bunker. So, someone, bless their soul, came up with the idea of putting a cube farm in the bunker. Well, even cleaned and sealed, concrete 'bleeds' oil for a while. No problem, they just built a box in the bunker and vented around it to remove any fumes. So, the cubes are in a box in an underground bunker with a constant wind between the bunker wall and box wall.
Had an office with a nice view and plenty of sun. Got moved into a cube that neither cellphones nor radio got a signal with this constant wind noise since I was up against the wall. I left in 8 months (for other reasons amazingly enough). I dearly wish that there were transcripts of the meetings that went into that project.
Hey! That was my experience. New product direction; needed some designers.
Show up, and everybody is working on firefighting old bugs with a fake Agile approach. The kind where the manager hands out tickets to folks and the only metric is how many trivial bugs have been closed this week.
Every time I spent any time looking into the code (million lines of crap) to see if anything could be done, I'd get widely criticized.
I'm trying to get out, but not having much luck. I wonder if recruiters are turned off by the fact that I'm looking for another job again after just a few months.
Across the major markets in the USA and Europe I’ve never seen a hotter market. If you aren’t getting responses I would ask someone for help with how you are marketing yourself.
I'm in a rather isolated place (I work remotely) so I need to find another remote gig. I'm also a UX designer, not a developer, so the market isn't quite as hot.
The nice thing about remote though, is that it's easy for me to disconnect emotionally from how shitty my current job is.
I mean, one could say my city is also hot by the number of search results from the keyword software in the job portals but after closer inspection, if you've been around the block a few times, you can easily tell that over 90% of those jobs are shitty micromanaged fake scrum-driven burnout meat grinders.
Therefore, the remaining 10% are spammed to death with resumes so they can afford to be incredibly picky and wouldn't even look at you without seniority in other prestigious places that do exactly what they're looking for. And they don't care for leetcode either so the barrier of entry remains prestige.
How long were you at the job before this (crappy) one?
3.5 years at gig X and then 5 months at crappy gig Y isn't an issue -- new gig wasn't a fit, easy to play that off. "I tried to make it work but it felt like a bait and switch" would be an acceptable answer.
But a track record of ~1 year or less at places says that you're the problem or you make a lot of bad choices.
Sometimes they’ll tell lies that their boss tells everyone willing to listen. Everybody knows these are lies, but they won’t always give you that “read between the line” interpretation during an interview.
The most obvious one is usually “we’re on an agile process”, but there’s so many other ones more subtle and hard to get a grip on, short of reading interviewer’s clues when they answer the canned answer.
Sometimes the same words just don’t mean the same things to them. Sometimes they don’t realize how bad their situation is.
“Reality shock” in the first days at some workplaces is a thing.
1. Workspace/office not the one you were shown/told. This is the most common one, in my few data points. I think people know it's a factor in appeal of the job, so it's mentioned, but the followthrough doesn't always happen.
2. Person you interviewed with is leaving. (One of the people I hit it off really well with in interviews was a tech co-founder of the established company. When I arrive as a new Architect, he apologizes and says he had been looking forward to working with me (which is not something I normally hear), but he just got an offer for a supercomputer startup that he couldn't resist. Fortunately, some other great people remained, and I ended up working directly with one of the other tech founders. I supposed I might've been hired due to the company knowing that some people were looking to transition out.)
3. Job not as described. (I've mostly avoided this common pitfall, but once got bit by it. I was recruited as the Research Scientist who'd execute on an idea that was sorta outside the scope of two professors who'd come up with it, but that they wanted to see it done, and it was up my alley. But, subsequent to discussion, when I'd been told I'd be the sole person leading&doing, one of the professors' grad students decided to do the idea for their dissertation, and I didn't find out until the first day on the job. It got worse from there, but the saving grace was that an all-around great 3rd person was also an "assistant" on the team, so, morale-wise, I was able to complete the entire year-long appointment I'd agreed to. I declined when the PI renewed the appointment for another year, and both us assistants asked not to have our names on the papers. It was unfortunate, because we did some good work, and the PI was willing to help me get my own ideas funded, but I couldn't commit to another year of the accidentally-bait&switch project.)
4. Famous culture broken. (My anecdote wasn't a first-day reality shock for me, but first-year. A successful with-revenue early Web tech company in a university town had a locally well-known policy slogan about how you advance, which seemed much more widely quoted than the "don't be evil" of another company, and was repeated to me when I interviewed. Long story short, while I was working there as a Senior Engineer, someone in company leadership was willing to spoil culture and morale, to let someone's nephew (or similar) break the slogan. I went and talked with the head of engineering, who normally had amazing poise and charisma, but he had no good explanation for that one. This was when other dotcoms were hiring the then-rare experienced developers like crazy... but companies sometimes do things that employees don't understand, creating new reality shocks.)
5. Representative from new parent company, walking around with representative from offshoring company, talking to employees about what they do, for multiple days. A bit like in "Office Space", but at an advanced Web tech company. (Also, I was concerned when they started asking me about an elaborate 3D puzzle that someone had assembled near my workspace before I was hired, they seemed skeptical when I said I didn't know anything about it, and then one of them asked where they might buy such a 3D puzzle, which I happened to know, and I couldn't resist being knowledgeable/helpful, even as I suspected it was just a trick.)
Reality shocks like these are another reason I'd rather talk with prospective employers, and get as much sense of the team and company as I can, rather than get distracted with one-way leetcode whiteboarding.
I've never flat out lied to a candidate, but I know part of my job as an interviewer is to sell the company/position, so I put a positive spin on things. Same thing the candidate is doing.
It's not even uncommon to be hired for one role and end up in another role for whatever reason.
Another thing is, policies change. Your interviewer could be grandfathered in and not know it (or know it, but don't mention it...). Or they could simply mention the last policy they remember, which isn't the current policy.
Some people also would rather just make up an answer rather than say "I don't know."
>It's weird that you didn't get the title in the contract
Job titles are not always correlated with job responsibilities. Hence we have "senior engineers" with a year experience. Title inflation is a real thing.
Technical interviewers aren't going to know HR policies as they apply to other people - its HR's job to give them that information. I don't know how much time off a new hire might get, for example. But a helpful technical interviewer might say "oh we start off at five weeks a year" because that's what they started out with four years ago.
>But when talking to your future peers/team mates, I think you can expect a lot of honesty if you ask the right questions about how things really are.
I've been lied to by every manager I've ended up working for. Too be fair, they've all been soft social questions, so I am partly to blame on that front. I've been terrible at identifying company culture until after I've taken the job.
Yep. It's happened to me as well. Based on the questions they were asking me in the interview and based on the folks who were interviewing me I got the impression I was going to be working on a certain technology very interesting to me. It took them a while to actually make the offer (2 months), by the time I started they indeed had me working on that interesting technology... but then about 2 weeks in it was like "There's been an urgent change, we now need to shift you over to working on some other [much less interesting set of tasks mostly involving writing documentation]." I figured, OK, this is just a temporary thing and after the urgent project blows over I'll get back to what they wanted me to work on originally. I'd often ask when I was getting back to work on the original project and they'd always hem and haw. Eventually it became clear that it was a bait&switch.
Mostly it's just the risk that you'll be found out and fired (which is similar to the risk on the other side of the table— that the employee will find out and quit).
>which is similar to the risk on the other side of the table
In principle but not magnitude, especially if you've relocated.
Usually you cancel any other pending offers once you've accepted a position if you're nice, and that could close some doors because someone else takes those jobs. Might even get you red-flagged if you go back to them and say "this company lied to me so I quit" (the other person has no way to verify that's true or you blew up on someone verbally the first week and got canned).
Someone correct me if HR can give the termination reason, I don't remember.
In the US at least, legally HR can tell them whatever they want. However if the supply anything besides employment dates, title, and whether or not they are eligible for rehire, they'll be open to a civil suit if the information given negatively affected their job prospects
> if the information given negatively affected their job prospects
Asking a prospective employer what your references said about you if they pass on you sounds like a tall order. I'm lucky if I can even get a response to a cover letter + resume, definitely have never been given feedback about a sample project solution or interview (other than hired or not).
Am I wrong and it's actually one of the easier pieces of feedback to get?
At least in the UK I'm pretty sure that lying on your CV is fraud by false representation [1]. CIFAS (UK fraud prevention service) produced a suitably scary leaflet [2] to try to discourage recent grads from doing this.
I thought they were exaggerating about things like jail time for lying on a CV but it has happened in the UK - six months for saying she had 2 A-levels!
> (which is similar to the risk on the other side of the table— that the employee will find out and quit)
Someone more left/anti-capitalist might argue that this is disproportionately in favor of the employer. The employee is depending on this job for food/shelter. Replacing the employee is much less disruptive to the employer than the employee. Especially considering the employee may have had to move to the area for that job.
Most employees (at least in the US) aren't given a contract, they're given an offer of employment. This provides no guarantees as to what work you'll do, or the conditions you'll do it in, and both can change at any time.
An offer of employment is a contract, if there is an exchange of benefits involved in the agreement (you work for us X days a week, we pay you Y).
Even if it's only verbal, it's a contract; contract law applies, and if you can prove the conversation happened, you can enforce the contract in law.
This is the same in the USA and in the UK. But of course, it's much better to get a written contract before starting work (or moving home, if that's what it comes down to).
And (of course) it's much harder for an employee to enforce a contract against an employer than v.v. Contract litigation can be very expensive.
It is very common for employment offer letters in the US to clearly specify that employment is offered at will. This status has slightly different exceptions by jurisdiction, but in general, it means the agreement can be terminated at any time by either party.
Most people summarize this as "you can be fired for no reason", because that's the most commonly discussed scenario. But, your employer doesn't have to terminate your employment to terminate your employment agreement.
> At-will also means that an employer can change the terms of the employment relationship with no notice and no consequences. For example, an employer can alter wages, terminate benefits, or reduce paid time off.
Now, they can't do this retroactively, but they can do it with zero notice.
In the UK, your contract is formed by: the thing you signed, any statutory law stuff, and any custom and practice stuff in your workplace. Generally speaking however, it's the same as what other people in this subthread have pointed out: you probably can't do a lot if the employer changes your contract, either officially or unofficially. Continuing to go to work implies acceptance and well. You could attempt to take the employer to an employment tribunal,but they're expensive (even more expensive thanks to the recent Conservative governments)
Source: used to be a trade union official. If there was a union for tech jobs, they might be able to pay for tribunal costs, but when I did it we only took them on if there looked to be a greater than fifty percent chance of winning.
I am a member of the Digital Division Committee of Prospect/Bectu Committee. We do take cases for existing members.
Unison has few places it represents at (probably more for historical reasons).
How ever apart from the costs we would only take a case to tribunal if it was a good chance of winning - as the pressure on the member going through a case is considerable.
Breach of contract is not illegal. It's a tort, and you might be able to seek recompense through the courts, but I don't know how they would determine damages.
I once has the most honest interviewer ever ask me:
> Where do you see yourself in 3 to 5 years?
I gave my typical response of technical lead, driving projects from the engineering side of things. His response was interesting.
> What would you think about not working here after 5 years?
The way they were able to run their shop was to use turn over to their advantage. They were custom software/hardware company that basically used as contract workers to make the widgets a company either has no time to make or doesn't know how to make. Their business model was to have you work on the project to the point where the contractor decides to hire you on full time to support the thing you helped make.
It was an interesting idea but showed they had no concept of stability for anyone besides upper management. Opted not to work there.
At my last job, I was told several lies (even during negotiations) that made the job sound far far better than it was. And this wasn't just from HR/recruitment. These were answers that I got from the many levels of upper management that I had to interview with.
I tried to reconcile those lies after settling in and having outstanding performance reviews. No dice. Ultimately ended up just leaving the company.
Lesson learned - Don't let them negotiate you into their range. Companies will lie to make their company sound like the shiniest, best place to work in the world.
> and I was absolutely not going to be leading anything
This scenario has been basically my life for the past several jobs. Companies will lie just to get you in the door. Never ask "Will I ...", because the answer is always yes. NEVER trust what a company offers.
I came in here to basically say that all these questions are great, but being able to just simply walk around the office and its departments (if it's that big) is also really important. You got bamboozled to a pretty extreme extent, but at least I know from my last employer that I'll be making damn sure that my future software development team isn't using older, slower computers than the marketing department.
I'm not sure where the impression that it's easy to find a tech job comes from. Like the parent commenter, I started searching on day 2 of my current job and it's been over a year with around 200 applications/cover letters, dozens of interviews, some offers, but no good fits. I graduated 2 years ago with ~120 others in my class - not a single person is working in our domain (biomedical engineering), they're either in the same undergrad lab, in some corporate code monkey job they hate, or in grad school/med school and given up on the industry. Finding a decent job is possibly the hardest thing I've ever had to do and most days it feels like it will never happen.
> I'm not sure where the impression that it's easy to find a tech job comes from.
A lot of it is just the usual Internet bragging mixed with the “shortage of engineers” meme that just wont die. Everyone can get a new job in 7 days, just like they all make $250k, drive Porsche 911 GT3s, and have supermodel partners. It’s just part of the Hacker News zeitgeist.
Now back to the real world, my experience is close to yours. My last job took 1.5 years to find, with about 100 applications sent, 10 phone screens, 3 companies seriously interviewing, and 1 offer. So you’re not doing too bad, really.
I totally concur. It took me over a year, after being the lead developer for a decade with tons of technical and business experience. Thank goodness for digital resumes cuz I sent out at least 200. If it weren't for the fact that I had my current job down to a science, giving me a lot of free time to interview, it would have been impossible to find a new job.
Because it wasn't on the west coast of the US? Because the ancestor poster is older than 30? Because that company had some secret non-poaching agreements? Because companies were preemptively binning the resume for not staying at the previous company long enough?
> my usual 1-2 years
A genuine question...(I am not from USA.)
Is this 1-2 years period normal for many people/IT companies? Is it similar to contracting- benefits and tech/business exposure wise?
It's a nice balance between not having to run the job search gauntlet for a while, and not getting significant pay increases or advancement opportunities unless you get a new job at a different company.
I've found 1-2 years is also about the time it takes for me to become bored and want a new project, new responsibilities (promotion), etc (I've only asked for a raise once during my entire career, so it usually isn't about the money when I leave, though I do usually get a nice pay bump for switching companies).
I'll ask for what I want, invariably get told some version of "no", and start looking for a new job.
I've found that a fairly reliable litmus test for the degree of influence and technical contribution you'll be in a position to make is the comp package they offer you. Your management will need to justify what they're paying you to their management, and having you be in a prominent and visible position helps them make that case.
Exactly what I came here to say, albeit quite a bit softer.
Without having had the benefit of reading TFA yet, the problem is that you are never asking "the company" questions. You are asking your interviewer questions. Their answer, like all non-sociopaths, will be internally true or mostly true to themselves[+], but be colored.
The mitigation for this is that you have to ask every interviewer the same few questions.
[+] Read any book on how to suss out liars and you'll see that everyone who is not a sociopath, has many "tells" that they actually cannot resist. ie, normal people are uncomfortable with lying.
I don't think it's the case for the parent but the "golden handcuffs" of RSUs+bonus as a major part of total comp is a pretty real problem. I used to think the very idea of "golden handcuffs" was ridiculous but by the time you realize the depth of the mistake you've made (2-3 months) you realize that you just have to fake it for a few more review cycles and then you get leave with an extra $100k in your pocket.
It helps that places that are awful also usually can't imagine that you would want to leave. Good places, ironically, worry a lot more about employee satisfaction. Bad places typically believe that everyone is really worried that they might not get promoted/have a long career at company XYZ so are very weak at spotting employees that have checkedout. The stick they wave is usually "you won't get promoted next year if you don't play the game!"
Of course this depends a lot on how much energy the job drains from you, but if you can still learn some stuff during the day and don't feel drained when you go home, a year is not such a bad sentence to serve for a nice bump to your savings... just don't make a career out of it.
The reason the market is so hot is precisely because so many shops are like this. If they were better managed then they could get away with fewer technical resources.
It sounds like they stayed there for about a year and had to move cities, so apparently the market in the area wasn't too hot for this to work. There are probably other people who stay longer, especially if they're not willing to move cities.
> "Oh, you won't be working in the new building..." and was taken to an old, windowless, leaky, mold-smelling building with peeling paint and flickering fluorescent lights
Got similarly cat-fished. Companies always conduct interviews in their best offices, not the ones you'll be working in.
I've always ended up with on-sites on the shiny, clean, well-stocked sales floors. When I ask to see where the engineers sit, it's usually a pretty abrupt downgrade.
I once interviewed with a company that brought me into a new, shiny, well-appointed building on the corporate campus for an interview.
I did well answering their questions. And they answered my usual questions correctly. Stuff like "Can developers here choose their own tools?" and "My title is going to be Lead Engineer, will I actually be a Lead Engineer?"
After I was hired, I found out everybody uses Eclipse, no exceptions, and I was absolutely not going to be leading anything (I was basically going to be used like an overpaid junior engineer).
The best part: "Oh, you won't be working in the new building..." and was taken to an old, windowless, leaky, mold-smelling building with peeling paint and flickering fluorescent lights (think the opening scene from "Joe vs the Volcano"). My office was a supply closet that was being converted into an office (by that I mean, "we just pulled most of the stuff out of here, but otherwise just rearrange the furniture however.") I was given an old 70s vintage desk that was too low, a sort-of broken chair, and a laptop and left to my own devices for three weeks while waiting for my new project to get started. Then I was suddenly moved to even worse accommodations - a cubicle, which belonged to an employee who had recently died (his stuff was still there, and it was a month before anyone came to take it away).
I started looking for a new job about 2 days in. Took me a year to find something else (I eventually had to move to a new city).