-If you only get canned questions, run.

-If questions are machine gunned without any followups, run.

-If the hiring/interview process is needlessly complicated, run.

-If they give you an IQ test or similar, run.

-If they're not paying attention [0], run.

-If a pattern exists of mistakes (forgot to call, etc), run.

-If, when discussing pay, HR says "Yeah, sometimes we hire people knowing they won't last and only fit a political agenda."..... run. True story.

-If the recruiter tells you, "The path you're going down will lead to failure unless you do a startup. Frankly, I don't see you doing a startup"... run. Also true story.

..Ultimately, it comes down to gauging how "human" they are towards you. If the interviewer[s] lacks empathy, it's a sign somewhere up the chain that something's not right. Mind you, that's not to say that the interviewer doesn't necessarily have empathy.

[0] Seriously, this happens at about 20% of my interviews. Put away your fucking laptop and just listen, interviewers!

- While you're going through your questions with the interviewer, he suddenly looks up from his laptop and says, "These are great questions. I'm going to have to use them next time I interview."

- Interviewing manager, sitting next to CTO, says to you, "Convince my boss here that automated tests are worth the investment."

- Executive of SEO company casually lets it drop that they're being sued by Google.

- You're meeting after 5pm and interviewing manager jokes with CTO during interview how his wife is the one making his smartphone buzz like a swarm of angry hornets. Then as you're exchanging your farewells in the lobby an hour or so later at end of interview, a fuming woman storms in, stands next to manager glaring, no one is introduced, and you awkwardly take your leave.

- The conversation somehow turns to what you would do if you won the lottery. You say you'd probably spend more time working on open source projects. The CTO interviewing you remarks that he'd buy a harem. The HR rep and the other developer in the interview, both female, laugh uneasily. A couple minutes later he repeats the comment.

Manager: So you like caving?

Me: Yeah, I was able to go on a month long expedition last summer to the mountains of Peru.

Manager: I can't believe your old job didn't fire you for taking a month off.

Me: I gave a lot of notice and had the vacation saved up.

Manager: That would never happen here. I have a problem leaving for a week.

In retrospect, I really appreciated the honesty. Declined that offer without hesitation.

They could easily threaten or guilt trip you when asking for a month off... If they would actually follow through is another question

It was by far the worst interview I've ever been to, though I've only had a few. She hadn't reviewed my resume, she hadn't looked at any work I had done, she started the interview late, and she took a conference call in the middle of the interview. The icing on the cake was that she started listing out job responsibilities and said:

"Your number one responsibility is keeping me happy."

I told her I didn't think I was a good fit for the position.

That one actually sounds good, as it means that people at the company aren't really expected to stay late.

During the same interview, the CTO said something to me like: "You can come in, do your work, and leave at 5pm every day. And that's fine. Or, you know, you can stick around a little longer and help take this company to the next level. That's great, too."

As soon as I got home, I googled the company a little more deeply and found a slew of developers complaining on Glassdoor about being pressured to work long hours and come into the office on weekends.

My read on the situation was that the wife had been waiting in the car out in the parking lot for an hour or two (I remember we wasted a half-hour on a whiteboard puzzle-solving exercise which, while kinda fun, didn't really seem that relevant to the position) and was beyond getting sick of this shit.

I imagined him pitching it to her like, "Hey, once we hire another dev, I can start getting out of the office at 5 every day like I promised," when in reality the two (interviewer and new dev) would just guilt each other (or maybe inspire each other!) into working even longer hours.

The daily domestic and the weekly I'm asking you to do this because I'm pissed at my partner and I know it'll piss them off got very wearing.

Probably worst place I ever worked.

That's a legitimately good question, and you should feel bad for not knowing how to answer it.

My answer to that question would be, "I will be very happy to. My rates as a management consultant are $X per day." :-)

Just saying you don't have enough information to formulate a plausible response doesn't make a very good impression from my experience.

They're asking you to qualify yourself and so you need to know where you fit into the equation.

Note that he does not say that he was unable to answer the question. That is a conclusion you jumped to.

For all we know it could mean "hey, for an interview exercise, I'd like you to sell (this guy) on the importance of automated testing."

Suddenly it sounds like a pretty good interview question.

I think it's kind of like dating: if they don't give you an obvious signal, you probably won't know until it's too late, and sometimes when you get an "obvious" signal you might be wrong anyway.

The only advice I can think of--beyond heeding obvious warning signs--is to try to work some place that's doing something you actually care about. Then you're less likely to run into incompatibility issues, and the effect of toxic people may be mitigated.

Another angle is that you probably can't avoid working with assholes, so you can get organized and be prepared to push your own agenda. Don't back down too easily. I've seen this work fairly well, but you have to be ready to deal with the stress and potential fallout. Depends on circumstances, YMMV, etc.

My recent employment adventure turned me cynical. My then-soon-to-be boss seemed great during the interview. He was technical, his questions were interesting and deep and the team seemed happy. Turns out he was a complete sociopath who made everyone's life living hell. The unhappy weren't invited to the interview.

The first clue from the second day at drinks should've been, "I voted no in hiring you, but [his boss/my previous company's CTO] convinced me to change my mind." in front of the other senior admin. Kinda downhill from there.

What makes these situations so difficult is that leaving a job early has such a strong negative effect on your future work prospects. Even worse, being unhappy at a job affects your work prospects, too. There really isn't a win in those situations.

It's a pretty good time to be a developer - most of us don't need to hang around under asshole bosses just to keep the rent paid next week. If you start a new role, and the red flags are waving madly on day 2, strongly consider walking out.

This advice won't apply to first-job-put-of-college devs, in that case you might just need to suck it up for a year, and put off buying that flash new car or taking that trip to Vegas until you've got 6 months living expenses saved (Note, may also not apply so well to fairly well paid junior or mid level devs who've gone way too deep with SF housing rental either... Same advice applies, build up a six month living expenses savings, so you _can_ afford to walk out on an asshole boss if you need too...)

But yes, other people did know what type of boss he was. The last recruiter I worked with said, "You worked for X? That guy was fucking mental..."

The aggravation can make you want to lose your cool, but like you said, not backing down is key. Nothing is worse than someone telling you that you are not doing your job and then never challenging them with an intelligent response. You then have to spread your gospel like you own it. Otherwise, you become guilty due to your perceived indifference.

>If they give you an IQ test or similar, run.

I ran across this study a few months ago that says IQ-like tests, structured interviews (canned questions), and work-sample evaluations were some of the few useful interview tools for selecting good employees [1].

[1]. http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

They're great for determining which employees will be productive

They're entirely terrible for figuring out which employees will be decent people to spend 9-5, 5 days a week with.

Realistically you need a bit of both

Work samples are my #1 competence filter. They've also formed the basis of great interviews.

As for your second point, sometimes you want to hire a change agent. It takes skill and practice to distinguish toxic personalities from the merely disruptive. Again, standard questions designed from a perspective of empathy and experience have helped me.

Unrelated to that -- one of my personal red flags is poor handling of the post interview follow up. If a company drags their feet, gives conflicting signals about next steps, etc., they probably are a mess.

Even if the test is good, it's probably calibrated on WEIRD [0] subjects, so is really only good as another kind of gatekeeper - you can probably use old-school IQ tests as an excuse to reduce diversity. People who aren't WEIRD may not do as well on these tests (even though they're just as "intelligent" (parenthetically bracketing the ill-defined term for a moment)), so you have your reason that you only hire white dudes. But that's a cynical extension of logic there.

Most people, when approaching a psychometric test like one of intelligence or personality make the first incorrect assumption that modern cognitive science can actually form a construct like "personality type" or "intelligence" that's stable across all cultures and norms, testable, and repeatable. That's just not really true, and by and large what makes it to public consumption is pseudo-science.

Diverting just a little bit here, but MBTI [1] is another good example of bad use of psychometrics in business. There's about as much science supporting Myers-Briggs tests as there is astrology, yet people still use MBTI for actual decision making. Types aren't shown to be stable and they're not well-clustered (meaning you can be a mix of introvert and extrovert, or show signs of both depending on the day, context, mood). Zodiac Sign and MBTI Type should only be used as pick-up lines in a bar. "Hey, babe, I'm an INTJ, so I'm not going to say anything else."

There are good uses of psychometrics, but they're rare enough that I take any reliance on any kind of psychometric during hiring as kind of a bad sign.

0: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/the-weir... 1: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/go...

I do find it surprising that Raven's appears to be more susceptable to the Flynn effect (people keep getting better at IQ tests, for an unknown reason).

Completely agreed on the MBTI, but its surprisingly difficult to convince people that's its useful.

FWIW, I agree with most of what you said above, I was just pointing out a counter-example. (Psychologist/psychometrician here).

Secondly, in this context, the assumption is that not only does this generalized attribute exist in humanity and we can measure it, but this attribute causes success in $job. That's a further assumption that I'd call into question. Sure, plenty of people who do well on $test do well on $job, but those could easily be covariate or epiphenomenological relationships rather than causal ones.

I don't doubt that for some values of $test, there's some discriminatory power predicting the presence of success, especially in more monocultural environments (affluent, often-white, often-male, often-young startups, to caricature). But I do believe that this kind of test would suffer from strong false negatives as many kinds of people who would otherwise be excellent programmers (or whatever other $job) are rejected for not doing well on $test.

That's why I worry about anyone who puts real stock in these kinds of tests - it is (generally) indicative of a kind of science blind spot in the user. People are critical and skeptical of all kinds of other scientific claims, but psychological measures tend to get a pass.

I imagine the fact that a lot of us tend to score well on IQ tests has a lot to contribute here. When I found out how many standard deviations above the mean my IQ score represented, I was pretty excited about how awesome I was. When I realized that the test was probably baloney, I had to figure out more interesting ways to shore up my self-esteem. Personally: I bake bread and fish for compliments on the quality of my sourdough.

I learned, as an adult, that I had taken an IQ test while young and had scored in the 99.97th percentile. I think that I got that not everything benefits from what IQ tests measure. That said, I had already started seeing great success in a knowledge industry. It is clear that you also have great linguistic intelligence. I don't think you could completely dissociate your IQ test results from that intelligence.

The fact that certain groups of people tend to test well (or, taken conversely, that there are so many reasons why otherwise "intelligent" people don't test well) just exacerbates this problem and I think the central claim is still reasonable: things like IQ tests aren't necessarily strong predictors of tech skills, are dangerously close to pseudoscientific when misapplied, and have enough other theoretical problems that they should probably not be utilized during a hiring process.

As to my own linguistic skills, I contend that a lifetime of reading as well as a MS (in computer science), a Ph.D (in cognitive science and education), and ten years afterwards in academics including a professorship has prepared me as a writer. Did I have some initial Potential that gave me a head start? Maybe. If nothing else, I had the head start of my general introvertedness and a love of both reading and geekiness. A short test that purports to measure a fixed potential somehow inherent in someone is going to be pretty flawed.

But my "I don't doubt" phrase was more along the lines of ceding a central point: there probably do exist certain inherent characteristics that vary between people and provide some kind of predilection or head start. I'm just not yet convinced that the scientific community has really identified them yet, or that they're really able to effectively measure them yet. Instead, we get proxies that have a very high false negative rate, especially among otherwise-marginalized groups.

Anyway, four paragraphs is probably enough here.

I had an MBTI test pretty much forced on me a while ago (senior engineer would be unhappy if I didn't take it). I argued very forcefully against it, saying it was like astrology, that it made me feel like the company was asking me to participate in some religious ritual when I was an atheist and so on. I'm not in that company anymore and one major reason I ran was that they allowed pop psychology like that to dictate decisions.

The worst I've seen was where I had to do 100 questions and half were spatial intelligence (gameable and wtf). It looked like an incredibly expensive piece of software. Didn't get the job, thankfully, but the company's now known for having a policy of not being able to talk about work out loud if you're in IT. The other places that gave me tests had dissimilar, but equally insane workplace policies.

Rambling list: -At some level, the person interviewing you (or management) doesn't trust their intuition to find the right candidate.

-It's an easy way to throw someone out of a pool despite all else. There's a reason it's illegal to do IQ tests.

-Mental health issues such as dyslexia or ADD.

-I've taken maybe five intelligence tests for work and none of them have been the same. Where's the standard?

-Companies have a weird tendency to use puzzles such as the "three light bulbs" one. All that does is test if you've heard it before. "I want to see how you think" makes no sense when the question's on paper and there's 100 questions just like it.

-A lot of these tests are gameable since you can just practice beforehand.

-Test anxiety sucks.

http://iq-tests-for-the-high-range.com/statistics/iq170.html

Also, please read about IQ and rational thinking: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rational-and-irrat...

Amen. IQ tests, or tests to see if you're psychologically a "good fit for the organization," are a sign that they haven't a clue what they're looking for, they don't trust their own judgment, and couldn't identify a good developer in a million years.

As a proxy for developer performance, IQ tests are utter crap - but IQ tests are something that's intelligible to your run-of-the-mill idiot manager, so they get done.

Psych tests are similar - they're saying that they can't figure out by talking with you whether you're a nice person or a psychopath. Which, OK, to be fair, psychopaths might hide it fairly well ... but if so they'd hide it well enough on the test, as well.

Totally agree it's down to how human they are towards you. If they're willing to see you as an individual vs. whether they want a new part of their machine.

I believe that this kind of intelligence test correlates well to being able to think coherently and abstractly in both numerical and non-numerical terms, and as such correlates well to being a good programmer.

As a proxy for developer performance, intelligence is strongly correlated.

In my one, there was clearly not enough time to do all the questions.

So I picked the questions I could easily quickly answer accurately; followed by the ones I could take and educated guess; then finally as time was running out just out and out guessed the rest. I did exceptionally well apparently :-)

Then I got the job, and worked on a typical CRUD system.

If developers aren't evaluated as people, but as units who are expected to hit some threshold of "intelligence," then that says something about the company asking you to take the test.

If everybody who tested well included everybody who was intelligent, or able to code well, you might be able to use it as a proxy. If not, you're missing out as a company.

The students who achieve the highest grades in school aren't those at the peak of the IQ range - they're the ones who actually have to put in the study time to learn the material, rather than cruising on previous knowledge. Do you want the person whose IQ score is better, or do you want the one who will do the work? If you want the better IQ score, what will you do to get them to perform when asked to do what might be regarded as drudgery?

Or are you saying that they give IQ tests to screen out the really bright bulbs, so as to isolate those who are willing to slog through whatever they're given?

How about someone who is both smart and willing to work hard?

Doing well on a test is usually an indicator that you do well on that kind of test. Even good psychometrics tend to fail with calibration problems - the vast majority of these tests were written and calibrated using psychology undergraduates at western universities. That's a significant sampling problem. [0]

So I'm personally not opposed to selecting for "smart" employees. But I do think that the belief that a short test actually selects for that kind of smartness in any meaningful way is sloppy thinking.

0: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/the-weir...

What about people with dyslexia (such as myself)?

What about people who have test-anxiety?

They aren't arguing that hiring smart people is a bad idea, they're saying being dismissive and discriminatory is a bad idea (and illegal, in the US - violation of the ADA).

Out of curiosity, this is a serious question: are you a programmer and if so does dyslexia cause you problems coding? lots of library functions can have confusingly similar names and spellings for me, and I don't have any reading problems.

I think sampling some code from the applicant could be a better indicator.

My friend said it was really effective - the person running the test told him a bunch of stuff about his personality and management style based on the test that he hadn't explicitly thought about but was helpful. It can help point out your blind spots and how you should approach people with different personalities and styles.

The problem with the Myers-Briggs personality test is that it is codswallop. It is made-up. It is not supported by scientific evidence. It has no predictive value. It is meaningless.

1) https://www.google.com/search?q=myers-briggs+bullshit

I never saw any personality tests done at Google.

so glad I left that place.

If the interviewer doesn't respect you, then management doesn't respect or listen to employees.

If you only get canned questions, then the company cares more about checking boxes than creative thinking.

If the interview process is complicated, _everything_ is complicated.

If they aren't paying attention, then nobody pays attention in any meeting, so they get repeated, or stuff constantly falls through the cracks.

If you're interviewing people for a job you're filling, focus on getting them to do a small test project and bring it in for the on-site. I've done this for years, never had someone say no. Worst that happens, they're too busy and back out. Fine, no worries. Works well for developers, release managers, program managers, technical writers, etc. Basically you want to be sure that they can solve problems. Memorized knowledge of facts has almost no value (to me) these days; things are changing way too fast for that to matter in the long run. Never understood why the Google's, Microsoft's, ask the goofy questions like "why are manhole covers round?". To me, the hires that are a joy to work with are adaptable, learn things pretty fast, take pride in what they create, show leadership by helping others in their group, and are dependable.

This.

"Trust your gut instincts. If something seems "off", run."

This is a much better advice than a list of arbitrary criteria of the quality of the interview process whose correlation with the work environment itself is unknown.

(why did that list blow up, anyway? I really don't understand this place....)

- A very biased outlook to problem solving. A lot of times I see my own boss think that the right answer (to an interview question) is the one that worked for our particular case without considering that the candidate didn't have the same constraints.

- I always like to ask 'the boss' what their idea of a good team is. Some of them will say stuff like 'A team is good when they're meeting deliverables' or 'A hardworking team' etc etc. Somehow the tone weighs in here -- you want a boss who is understanding yet not a pushover, who justifies (and thereby convinces you of) his decisions when it comes to a solving problems.

- You really want to avoid the bosses who have a desire to work long hours for no real reason. This is important because of two reasons: they don't focus on the real problems and they don't value their teammates time. A good boss wants to make sure that their team is aligned with the company goals and that everyone on the team is happy and is enjoying their time with their colleagues.

Hope that helps!

Chat up the office staff. If they're treated like shit, run. If the founder blows through them, run. You can find some of this on linkedin.

You can search specifically for former employers on linkedin. Consider how many of them there are; there shouldn't be lots for an A round startup.

> -If respect isn't reciprocal, run.

Yes, in theory, but this is deceptively difficult to judge accurately on first impression. Some good people are naturally less immediately personable than others and misconceptions are common.

> -If the hiring/interview process is needlessly complicated, run.

This is a bad sign in terms of the company as a whole, and could indicate that you'll need to wade through some needless bureaucracy in your prospective job from time to time, but this is relatively common in bigger companies and doesn't necessarily indicate anything negative about the actual team/leader/interviewer you'll be directly working with/under on a daily basis.

> -If a pattern exists of mistakes (forgot to call, etc),run.

Worth considering, but it seems a little picky to say a hard no based on this alone. Some of the best technical people I've worked with are not necessarily 100% organised administratively 100% of the time.

> -If they're not paying attention [0], run.

This happens far too often. Fully agree. Run!

As an employer, I get some extra hours out of you and all it took was a few beers, or an Xbox, or a table game. That is a good investment for me, but not so good for you. It's the casino approach to maximizing profits. I'll give you free drinks and smokes, so stay a while.

My company's approach: We encourage people to wrap up their day at a healthy time, preferring to work smarter during our shorter days. We ask people in different time zones not to respond when getting chat/IM messages if it is outside of their work hours. They were doing this and it wasn't fair to them.

Despite this, our team puts in longer hours than we want because they are given challenging work and rise to the challenge. If we have to ask people to work extra time, as we did this week, we do it with the acknowledgement that we have had a lapse in planning on our part and we thank them for their commitment. Later, we go through and understand why we were unable to deliver and work on doing better with our planning.

I'm still upset about the massive waste of time. Why did you not consider my resume before giving me a massive take home project. I took a day off work to build this thing, the least you could do is look at it. I shined that code to a beautiful luster.

Anyone here from FB who passed this and knows what I did wrong?

This rule is important because it makes the widths of the events deterministic, which otherwise they are not. That same test illustrates this exact problem, why not have the widths be 1/2, 1/4, 1/4, 1/2? Considering the first constraint the correct layout is all having width 1/3.

https://github.com/thejsj/calendar-exercise/blob/master/test...

I tried to impress them by not using any libraries, that may have been a mistake. It was a couple years ago now...

> If two events collide in time, they MUST have the same width. This is an invariant. Call this width W

The solution is actually much easier that way.

If they say no, you say no.

Also, if there's no pay, wouldn't you have copyright over that part of the code then? You could arbitrarily tell to stop using your code at any time, and sue them if they don't..

I mean, if we're lucky enough to work in a sector with lots of offers available, better make the best of it by finding a place we truly enjoy.

Maybe it ends up being one that pays you a bit less but has an amazing crew or great benefits or work/life balance. Find out what matters the most to you and make sure you get an acceptable answer (from several sources if possible) before committing to a company.

If nobody runs, like I'm suggesting, then these issues will just continue. Hell, a week ago I ran from a nice job. The two interviewers were on their laptops, not paying attention. After the interview, I sent a rejection email to the internal recruiter and later got a very, very apologetic response and phone call. We're all humans, so why act like dicks about it?

The only time I've interviewed, I was 23 and hiring for a release engineer at an enormous bank on a giant global FX system. No training. No advice.. nothin'. Even though the candidate was technical, I got an unsettling vibe from him. We eventually hired him anyway since "weird feeling" isn't good on paper. Oh man, was he awful. For example, during training and meetings, he would be on his phone, texting constantly. He made a mistake while training him that caused an outage that eventually led to me getting let go.

A bit of interview training there would have gone a long, long way and should have been mandatory, or at the very least, offered.

Their hiring process is so full of shit that between the interviewer and the recruiter, they somehow managed to forget two phone interviews which I left work early for both times. When they finally and successfully initiated a third interview (again, left early), it was with someone who sounded like they wanted to jam a pen in their eyes from debilitating boredom. You could hear the eye rolls from over a thousand miles away as if I was some sort of nuisance who shouldn't be listened to. Why would I want to work for a place that drains the life out of someone that much, then uses them as an introduction to the company?! "Hello welcome to I Hate My Life, can I make you hate yours, too?"

I never received a call back, nor did I get an apology.

There aren't enough middle fingers or taboo words in this world to express how pissed off I was at them for the way that they behaved. It was just plain unprofessional, dammit.

That sucks for them and all, but get over it. At the very least, learn to fake interest. If you can't even do that, then yes, the candidate should run far away.

" I am not saying this is right, and I also think the system is broken, but it's system's fault, not the interviewer."

The interviewer is the one who's doing it. So yes, much of the blame does fall on the interviewer.

http://eprints.keele.ac.uk/1422/3/hamilton_mccabe_org_2016.p...

Can you explain this one a little bit please? I'm not quite sure I understand the sentiment here.

The point is just that dismissive attitudes are everywhere in job searching, so it was just a damn good feeling to hear the guy with pie on his face.

Is this applicable to bigger companies? I've noticed that some companies figure out where to place entry level engineers during or after an offer is made. And then getting a good recruiter seems to come down to luck at some places. I once had an interviewer not show up for a phone interview at one place. But I wouldn't necessarily say that my boss would have been horrible, I don't even know if I was interviewing for a specific team.

One example - It took one of those big companies three weeks to get the last signature of 6 to signoff on my hire. There was nothing anybody could do to push it forward. That turned out to be one of the worst jobs I've had. 6 months in, they ended up firing the NOC after forcing them to train a NOC out in Bangalore who would call me 5 times a day for unrelated issues. I complained hard. My boss, who I talked to maybe once a month responded with, "Welcome to $COMPANY." I quit two weeks later.

  -If you only get canned questions, run.
  -If questions are machine gunned without any followups, run.
  -If they're not paying attention [0], run.

If the questions you're asking are canned, or _your_ questions are machine gunned, and you don't follow up on the responses of your interviewers you're missing out on an excellent opportunity to get a read on what it's really like to work there. I'll grant you that reading people is not a science, but if don't go any deeper than "So what's it like to work here?", you're missing a big opportunity.

Make your questions unique, so your interviewer has good reason to pay attention. Don't just hit the softballs and nod. If they give you a vague answer, try to get them to be more specific.

For example, follow up "How are team successes and failures treated at $COMPANY?" with "Interesting. Could you give me an example of a specific situation where the team failed, and how it was dealt with?" with "Do you think it was the right response? Do you think there's any room for improvement?"

  -If the interviewer[s] lacks empathy, it's a sign
  somewhere up the chain that something's not right.

I think a lot of this comes down to going with your gut. Sometimes things are not exactly as advertised, so another piece of advice I'd give you is: Don't overthink it. Human beings have evolved to detect when something is, you know, "a little off". Trust yourself, but attempt to verify.

Finally, if you aren't in a rush, I've almost always been given the opportunity at the end of the interview to "reach out with any additional questions". Let the interview simmer for a day or so, and then take them up on their offer. Think about where you might have seen some hesitation, bases you may not have thought to cover in the initial interview, and see how they respond.

Trying to be clever in detecting a bad workplace neglects one of the most powerful tools at your disposal, your ability to ask questions that'll reveal whether it's a good place for you or not.

That's interesting; it conflicts with one of the few pieces of evidence I have about successful correlation in recruitment. I don't have the study to hand, but I'm sure its conclusions were that people who do well at IQ tests (although they might have been more general intelligence tests rather than specifically IQ tests) tend to make better technical employees (or indeed, almost any kind of employee), and that's it's one of the few actually reliable indicators. As a strong rule of thumb, smart people are better at technical jobs.

What's the thinking behind taking it as a sign of a bad employer?

Let's say you're an experienced developer. You have an impressive work record, open source contributions, and ace the technical interviews.

Then your potential employer asks you to take an IQ test.

Legality aside (and it may be framed as a "general aptitude test" or somesuch), this may be very insulting to some people, who feel their contributions and achievements should stand on their own without bullshit tests. It signals to them "we don't care what you've done, and you can prove you can do, or your years of experience or education, you getting the job depends on an arbitrary test we're going to throw at you". You're not going to be treated as an individual, but rather a set of points on a score sheet.

Now you may be right or wrong as to whether these tests are indicative of ability, but for a lot of applicants they would be a red flag.

The original assertion was not "If you've done very well at a series of interviews and proved your ability already, and then they want to give you an IQ test, run."

Don't get me wrong, I love to see open source work, it is a plus and it definitely helps paint the picture of what the candidate is passionate about. But just having impressive open source work alone is not enough to make the technical interview unnecessary.

> and ace the technical interviews

If there's an IQ test after they ace the technical interviews, then that's a really weird order to do the interview, but I don't think that's the situation that the above comments were talking about.

Open source is usually a free time pursuit, so quite possibly they did spend several days on a small change because they had better things to do. Or the small change was the result of several days of tracking down a difficult bug.

My point was however that whether or not IQ tests are effective, making experienced developers sit through them (or indeed junior developers who may have verifiable academic or other accomplishments) could be seen as insulting or degrading. If your goal is not to unnecessarily piss off good candidates who may then bad-mouth you to their friends or bring up the issue on Glassdoor, then IQ tests - even discarding the legal implications - are perhaps not such a great idea.

I have a high IQ (so I'm told) and when I work at companies like these, they're managed like absolute hell. Metrics for miles and using technology rather than proper management to manage people.

Building social skills to identify intelligence is much more effective and significantly more personal. Yes, it can be gamed, but so can intelligence tests. The last one I took had 50% questions similar to, "If you rotate this paper 120 degrees and flip it, where does the dot end?" You bet your ass I took that test with a piece of paper in hand.

I'm not saying what I did was right, just that there was some justification to it.

Anyway, I would say it's not necessarily a good way to consider a candidate as the results can be subjective and doesn't indicate what to do if the best coder in the area sucks at taking tests while under pressure.

Only if they can't show it's materially related to the ability to do the job.

When I first started working for the IBM LTC, IBM had an online aptitude test as part of their application. The results directly determined both whether you got hired and how much you got paid.

As opposed to all the other completely objective ways of evaluating a candidate?

By the way, in Europe very few companies do IQ tests of employees. However.. the thought that it might be illegal to qualify potential employees based on IQ tests would simply not occur to us. I guess you guys in the US have a more, eh, colorful history for good and bad.

There is pretty clear relationship between, say, SAT scores and measured performance in college but that correlation is easier to accept intuitively. (Given that college GPA depends to a large degree on performance on tests.)

That said, apparently I'm very difficult to manage. When managed properly, though, I do really good work (so I'm told). When managed badly, it's a completely different story - and usually at places that require IQ tests ;).

All an IQ test does is gives you a reason NOT to hire someone. Why not work on building the social skills required to identify smart candidates if you're trying to hire smart candidates?

The low hanging fruit here is:

* ALWAYS spend time with your future boss prior to accepting. Ideally try to spend as much time as you reasonably can. If this isn't possible push back pretty hard about why. Your direct manager is usually the biggest reason for your unhappiness at a job. "People don't leave jobs, they leave bosses" is a cliche for a reason.

* If people seem unhappy when you interview, don't assume it's just how they feel that day.

* Make sure you get a sense for the culture and whether you want to be part of it. If you're not into constant group activity, make sure you're not joining a hyper-intense "everyone hangs out with each other all the time" sort of place. Conversely if you're new in town, don't join a company where everyone is focused on working hyper efficiently and bouncing to go home to their families. Neither is right or wrong, but they can definitely be right or wrong for you.

* If you're connected, track down people who left the company and ask about your future boss. Were they hard to work with? Do people like them? If you have friends at the company (ideally, not reporting to your potential boss) ask about how your boss (and the department) is perceived by the rest of the company.

* Hit up linkedin and track down ex employees, ideally in the same job role. See where they ended up, and hit them up and ask why.

Good luck!

Agreed, this is really effective albeit sadly not very common. You could say something like, "Hey, I thought the interview went really well, but I'd like to get together for an hour or so and just talk about software methodology and about your company's products to see if we're on the same page," but what you're really doing is interviewing your new boss. I don't think any good hiring manager will turn down a request like this.

Not always possible. For example, at a lot of the larger technology companies, you'll be hired (on paper) by a group manager, who'll then assign you to one of the handful of teams he or she is in charge of. And that's leaving aside stuff like what Facebook does, where you spend 6 weeks "in training" before being assigned to your actual team. Or Google's policy of not informing people what teams they're being hired for.

In that situation, my the best thing to ask about is the transfer policy. A bad team is bearable for a finite period of time, if you know there's a fixed path to getting out.

100x this.

I did this for my last position since a recruiter I've worked with mentioned that the company had some sort of an exodus recently (at that point). The guy not only responded quickly, but gave me a GLOWING review of the place (mind you, he QUIT!)

This gave me exactly the confidence I needed to confirm that the job was as cool as I thought it would be, and I was right!

A lot of this starts from how you found the position in the first place, and why I believe it's generally better to job hunt at tech meetups and conferences - before you've been thrown into the formalized process of interviewing, you've met these people already in a more natural environment.

"If you could wave a wand and instantly change one thing about this company/job/team, what would it be?"

This is similar to "what is wrong" but frames it in a positive light, so people are more open and creative.

If the answer is anything about people "I wish communication was better", "It would help if more people were on board for this project", "A change in management wouldn't hurt, haha j/k" etc. That's a red flag.

If it's about non-people "I wish we didn't have so much legacy code", "I would love it if we could get our testing setup better", "There are no good places to get coffee around" that's a good sign that aren't major people problems.

If they can't think of one, that's a real cause for concern!

This is one of my favorite questions in general because what people wish for tells a lot in many ways about the major problems, but without people begin guarded. They're fantasizing not venting.

The problem with it (at least in my experience) is that most people don't know how to answer this, so they'll give the most generic stuff they can conjure at the top of their mind. Furthermore, your interviewers aren't given any incentives to telling you what they really think, and they are much less likely to tell you something negative about the position when put on the spot like that.

That said, I usually ask this question when I can't think of what I really want to ask. :)

If anything, the social aspect of a job is equally or more important in my search for a job.

The difference of course is that I didn't have the insight to ask the right questions, however that didn't pose a problem because the first thing the CEO said to me basically answered exactly this.

After two rounds with the person who would become my boss, I proceeded to the third round on one simple basis: I still had no clue about what the company actually did (information logistics. Obvious?). I also had no clear picture of what I would be doing, only generic expectations. So I proceed to the third round, sitting in the room with my headhunter (which was absurd in itself at the time), and the CEO opens the door, walks in, and exclaimed in frustration:

I fucking hate teflon heads.

At that point, I immediately knew this was the job for me, whatever it was. For me, at the time, only a few things were truly clear: this place had serious problems, the attitude of the management was not in line with that of the employees (seemed clear even without having meet a single individual), and there was a serious gap between the managements goal and the organization's ability to execute. To be honest, all that went on mainly in my subconscious, at the time I told myself that this place is in such deep shit that I can't possibly fuck it up any further.

It turned out to be the right call, the organization was blowing in changing winds, and the current (20) employees were doing their best to maintain business as usual rather than business as necessary. Due to the chaos and my initial understanding of the situation,i quickly progressed and ensured that whatever I did, I would be making clear and firm decisions in line with what was needed to achieve the main goals, regardless of whether or not it was my mandate to make those decisions or not.

I realize that this could all have gone the wrong way as well, I could be permanently suck implementing new customers in Cobol (new from scratch Cobol code in 2007), but instead I pushed for complete and fundamental change. Such is the path to architecture, led through example, confidence and communication.

For the rest of the interview, the CEO continued to deliver the same canned pitch of what the company did, with minimal interest, just wanting to sign and get it over with. That first sign of weakness was enough to predict what kind of troubles I would be facing. I went eyes open into a troubled organization, and stick with it for seven intense (but moderately happy/frustrating) years. Wouldn't trade that experience for anything, but at the same time I would never recommend that company as an employer to anyone. I now know that I can thrive in this kind of negative situation and improve it for everyone involved, do what would be a clear red flag to some seeking a simple happy path is an open invitation to me.

All in all an extremely rewarding adventure, filled with challenges of every type at every turn.

From the website, I could clearly see that the company ambition wasn't anywhere near the reality I was presented (and even from there I couldn't quite grasp what they actually did, though to clarify with hindsight, information logistics basically entails accepting massive amounts of documents for distribution from large businesses, interpreting and transforming those to a destination format and layout, running distribution optimisation, and finally multi channel distribution to electronic archives, postal services, electronic invoicing, email, et cetera..)

Given the attitude of the CEO, it was clear he was painfully aware of the disparity, and I decided that the position I was being hired for had the potential to do something more should I be up to the task (though fairly clear that the CEO had given up on humanity in general and didn't have any idea of how to get out of the rut except doing more of the same to keep up with demand).

To be clear, this could all have gone terribly wrong, and if I hadn't spoken out of place at a few occasions, it would have.

Generally though, the first thing I consciously did to put myself in a position to gain the trust of the employees (which is always fundamentally critical in a transformation) was to clearly request that I start work early, in a low position. In my case, that meant working the floor of the print house, dealing with the Xerox dp180 printers and some Pitney Bowes enveloping machines. This was a menial area, relatively devoid of tech except the so called production control system which was a bastardized as400 running some of software from 1994 which had been repurposed to be the finance system at some point..

I think I would generally equate this to starting out in helpdesk or local it support for a few weeks. Absolutely invaluable.

Once progressed to my position proper, it was far easier for me to make correlations between production problems and related inefficiencies to systems design, maintenance, etc. Essentially I started asking questions no-one had asked before and started bridging the divide. Less than a year later,i had the mandate and ability to tear the whole system apart, causing the casualty of the most senior programmer there at the time (he didn't agree to anyone other than him touching his baby, so he left).

Long story short, in desperate situations where management have exhausted their known options, and are bound by higher powers, they will accept reasonably formulated and logical arguments - provided it actually solves THEIR problem. Stepping over the roadblocks above you to meet those issues face oh is a necessary part of that.

Another way is to ask how decisions get made. Again, the specific answer is going to probably be something pretty non-controversial, so look for the subtleties.

Sometimes it's just obvious that it's too risky. I had one interview where the hiring manager's boss managed to freeze him out of his own loop. I ran from that one.

Also, you should be very skeptical if you felt like your interviews with individual contributors were lukewarm or poor but you still get the offer. That's very possibly a boss overriding flags from his team, or a team that's deadened enough to not throw flags in the first place. If you don't feel the interview went well, trust your gut--might not be just your fault.

I sent him an explicit "thanks for the generous offer, but I've chosen to go elsewhere after consideration" email so he had something to forward, thanked him kindly privately, and ran like hell.

It's pretty amazing what you'll run into across a career. I've probably seen more WTFs from the hiring side of the table than from the people I've interviewed to hire.

I never met any of my future team members. I asked the hiring manager during the interview to introduce me to the team, but he said this wasn't going to be necessary.

Now, a few months into the job, I must say that I've never worked on any team composed of such antisocial people. Pretty much no one here communicates effectively. Cliques are demarcated along racial lines; there Chinese and Indian groups don't really talk to each other, and don't "accept new members" that don't speak their language.

This is the loneliest place I'd ever worked. What's surprising is that I never thought I could be so lonely at work of all places.

So, lesson learned: if you aren't allowed to do a meet-and-greet with the team before accepting an offer, don't even think about taking it!

That's the pointer right there, he sees interviews as one way and not a two way street.

I guess that you'll know next time to demand your needs whether they are deemed "necessary" for offer letter or not.

This is pretty common among both racial groups.

And, if we're talking about the US, it was common across pretty much every ethnic group that emigrated here.

- Do the others on the team seem happy? Did you get to meet any during the interview process? Do they seem to be happy to work there and comfortable in the environment?

- Does everyone seem to get quiet or smile officiously around the boss? That's a big warning sign. It probably means the boss is a bit of a tyrant or maintains an unhealthy power differential with the team. There is absolutely no room for this kind of posturing in a startup.

- Do you witness anyone coming to the boss for help with something? If so, and if the boss responds in a positive way, it's a great sign. A good boss is someone who is there to help everyone succeed and lend expertise when asked.

- Does the boss say anything disparaging about the other team members during the interview? Look out for indignant, judgy sorts of comments that indicate that the boss feels shortchanged by the team he/she has (unless you are explicitly being hired to single-handedly turn the team around).

- Is the hiring manager, founder, etc., transparent about runway, the cap table, and turnover rates? Playing it close to the vest about any of the three is a very bad sign.

- Do you see any VCs or investors stopping by uninvited and just hanging out? If so that's a good sign and means there is transparency with investors (which doesn't happen in all startups).

- Are there "big company sounding" organizational titles like "Senior Director", "Senior VP of x", "Senior Engineer", etc? If the company has fewer than 200 employees, titles like these indicate a wide array of culture problems, usually starting at the top.

I'd much prefer a team where everyone's merit is judged by their day-to-day contribution rather than by the title they negotiated during the hiring process.

Even the people in my own team have wildly different titles.

When you are interviewing somewhere, treat it as if they are trying to convince you and you need to ask a ton of questions to figure out if they are a good fit or not.

Frame these questions in positive, generous light so you seem like you genuinely want to work for them and are just trying to get all the details.

"What is the thing that most pleasantly surprised you when you started working here?"

As someone who interviews quite a lot of engineering candidates: we ARE trying to convince you. That is no secret.

We want to know what kind of an engineer you are. If you're good enough, or show aptitude to make up the lack of any otherwise expected skills, we are interested. Even if we decide to pass, you still deserve the same attention as any other candidate. Treating a candidate poorly for any reason is bad PR, and perhaps more importantly signals internal consent that it's okay to be rude. That sets a bad example. (You do that once, don't get told off, and soon enough others have picked up on it because who would want to spend any more time on candidates we won't hire?)

When it comes to hiring, everything is PR.

Over time I have reduced paying attention to what they are dangling in front of me, be it compensation or interesting stuff I want to work on.

I now mostly pay attention to the people. Specifically the quality AND loyalty of people to the firm\manager\founder etc. The AND is critical. If its just one or the other I walk. So for example, if its a 3 year old team and there is no one "smart" who has lasted atleast 2 years its a good sign to walk. If its a 6 year old firm and there is no one who has lasted atleast 2 years it's a great sign to walk. If there are people who have lasted and aren't "quality" its also not worth it. My definition of quality is they are smarter than me, or have done something I have respect for.

If its a new company I don't work with them unless I personally know the people involved.

Why these rules?

Cause if the people are "right" the interesting work and adequate compensation follows. Doesn't matter if the project fails your time with such folk is never wasted.

Your first job out of college has a high probability of being a bad fit and this is especially true if you're desperate to just get hired. So, it didn't work out... happens a lot. The important thing to do is to figure out what YOU want out of a job/workplace and to assess what that potential job can do for your career.

I think its a waste of time to try to figure out some minimal set of "red flags" to use for future interviews. Just look at the big picture, there's no single red-flag that will tell you definitively that a place is miserable (nor is there a single observation that signals an awesome place-- foozball and snacks won't make up for asshole-driven management).

Perhaps even more important than what you observe during an interview is to really examine your own needs and expectations. SOoooo many people are unhappy WHEREVER they go and always blame it on management, co-workers, the industry or whatever. This kind of serial discontent is a sign that the there's something wrong with the individual rather than their workplace(s).

All I am saying is that people who take on one job after another and remain unhappy would benefit from some serious introspection.

In other words, as important as it is to evaluate potential employers, it is just as important to carefully examine one's expectations and career intent.

Do you truly believe there are no signs for anything?

So how do you prevent this from happening? I personally avoid a company where I don't know someone in it, or know someone that knows someone.

Additionally, there's a nice hidden feature of LinkedIn. You can search for people who used to work there. At one company I interviewed at, I searched and found that those who used to work there...the majority left within a year. It tells you something. I had a sense during the interview that the turnover was high, and again they would BS me about their wonderful culture. Then I spoke to someone who used to work there and he confirmed my thoughts. Oh yeah, the fact they were going to throw a lot of money at me raised a red flag too (the toxic company I was at threw a lot of money at people too).

Good luck.

"If you could change one thing without veto, what would it be?"

If the person describes a technical problem, that's usually a good sign. Long silence is usually good (but can also be a very bad sign if they just can't pick one thing). Trivial nitpicks are a good sign. Any complaints about communication are a very big red flag. Also any complaints about leadership. Obviously, if the problem your interviewer describes is repeated by any other interviewers, that is a big, red flag.

Piece of advice when firing this atomic weapon at your interviewer: Do not fill the silence while they think with any talk. Let them think. Let the silence hang. That makes people more likely to dig deep for something they really don't like.

I agree. When they ask me what questions I have for them, one of my first ones is "What would you say is the most positive aspect, or aspects of working here, and what would you say is one of the biggest challenges". As he said, if (check) the answer is "communication challenges" and (check) you hear this from two or three people, that's definitely a red flag.

Another thing is if you are scheduled for an interview at 3 PM, and you are kept waiting for half an hour, and are then told that a fire came up they had to take care of, or they're disorganized and the interview fell through the cracks - and then they tell you one of the main people you had to talk to is not there and that you'll have to come back to talk to them - that sort of thing is obviously a red flag too.

No, I was genuinely interested in the answer. I wanted to see examples of how someone might answer the question.

> You can't trust a recruiter's answer, but if you're a programmer being interviewed by programmers, you can usually trust the answers.

I'd also be interested in the answer to that question from a first-line or second-line manager. Whether they answered it honestly or not, the answer would likely be helpful as part of the interview.

- What do you hate about your job?

- How unlimited is unlimited vacation?

- What's the mean/median number of vacation days taken last year?

- How have you shown that you value your employees?

- How do you handle disagreements with potential hires?

- If the team is split on a technical issue, how would this be resolved?

Company bullshit (bad signs):

- "We want people who want to work here. If salary is important we aren't for you."

Uncomfortable answers to any of the questions, run!

Or having a canned answer means they've encountered this before and have an acceptable response ready to go in order to cover up greater faults. If you ask them and they immediately blurt out "Sometimes we work too hard" how honest are they being? It's no different from interviewing a prospective employee and they say "Sometimes I work too hard". Thus, an immediately prepared answer is a very unreliable indicator. Just maybe they have that answer prepared as experience has taught them to avoid being forthright about the actual problems going on, because then they'd never hire anybody.

(Just playing devil's advocate. I really do think it could go either way, dependent on their personality, how their mind works, how management operates, etc.)

1) What is your leadership style?

2) How do you resolve conflicts on the team?

3) Tell me about the communication style of the team.

If you get a chance to talk to team members without the boss being present, ask similar questions - conflict resolution, communication, collaboration styles, etc. This should give you enough information to judge for yourself if it is a healthy team environment, or not.

I think a lot of programmers are the same, so I'd ask the non managers interviewing me what's the place is like to work at.

But... it's easy to "fight the last war" about things like this. So if for your next job, you're 100% focused on finding a boss that's a decent human, you'll probably succeed. But something other major will be wrong.

In hindsight, you realize you care deeply about some particular aspect you carelessly glossed over in the beginning.

I too just got out of college and tried to find my first job out of school and took the first offer. These are the signs that I picked up on.

- Arrived to interview to find that what I applied for was not what I was interviewing for ... RUN! - When trying to get a straight answer about benefits or how long individual training may be and getting a lot of "I'll get back to you" and no one does... RUN

- When waiting for your interviewers and recruitment has to come in and ask you if you have already spoken to your interviewers (i.e. their late or no show) ... RUN either they are way to up their own ass or just terrible at time management which if it's your future boss means they will have no time for you

- Last one promise, when interviewing and you get asked questions that you know the answer you gave to be 100% and they say it's wrong and tell you an answer that isn't correct. Run!

That interviewer or interviewers indirectly just told you that they dont follow or are going against what the documentation stateted.(in my case how elasticsearch is configured)

I.e. you will work in an environment that will leave you with knowledge that is incorrect and useless to use in another interview.

For example: within the company, IT is a second class citizen compared to production, so as a new developer you would start at the bottom of the bottom with no valid career perspectives. Low budget, bad offices, low pay, appearance of overwork are clear signs.

For example: aberrant company culture. Excessive secrecy and/or security measures (who do they think they are?), extravagant recreational resources (are they actually working?), excessive luxury (not bad by itself, but you want them to spend that money on your salary), excessive conviviality, etc.

There is a meta-warning sign about company culture: refusal to show working conditions and procedures to you because of conscious "discretion" and subconscious shame. Also, you could like, accept as normal, or justify because they make sense in context some of the bad attitudes you are aware of, failing to see they are a problem.

When it's not done in malice, that can be an interesting indicator. It means that the people on the team trust each other - trust that they can say such things and have it received in the right spirit, and trust that the one saying it isn't saying it in malice.

I wouldn't make this the only indicator, but it's an interesting data point...

I always try to go out of my way to meet the team and shake their hands (even if the interviewer didn't plan for me to meet anyone). You can gauge a lot from just a brief interaction with people.

First off, protect yourself, ask to see the contract, guarantee any agreements for future pay/bonuses are in there, the contract must specify working hours, time off and notice period etc. Ask to see the resume's of the team you would be working with.

Orange flags come to equipment, books, resources. A good company will give you whatever you need.

Red flags are arrogance, delusion, recklessness, bullying.

Ask tough technical questions, see if they admit they don't know it or rubbish the question.

Ask about ventures, projects things that went wrong, do they blame everyone but themselves? How many people have left in the last 12 months? Ask to speak to them.

How much runway do they have left? less than 3 months is a massive no. Has anyone ever been paid late?

Honestly, if they're smart enough you can't tell until you're knee deep.

If I'm talking to other programmers and not management, I generally ask:

- Are you happy here? Why?

- Every job has little annoyances (important preface). What are some of the things you wish you could change?

- Do you believe your leadership is interested in your feedback?

I also REALLY try to observe the body language of the employees interacting with each other. Even if I can't hear what's being said outside the interview room, it can tell you a lot about the company culture.

I have had bosses who I thought were horrible and many others around me liked them. I have had bosses that I would go to the ends of the earth with and my co-workers thought I was crazy. A lot of times it is personality and confidence (in yourself and in your manager) which dictate how well you will get along.

How to find the right match when you are interviewing? Well, how many dates does it take for you to decide who you'd like to marry? Do you marry everyone you date? In this business, I think it's best to not get too emotionally tied down. You're going to move, and that's ok.

Can you put your finger on what you boss does that is unacceptable? Is it because of:

* the way she/he makes decisions? * the way she/he provides feedback? * the way she/he defines success for your tasks? * the way she/he socializes?

If you uncover the underlying behavior that could be better, this should help you do a bunch of things:

* Decide for yourself how you would handle these situations * "Manage up", by framing what you bring to your boss differently and giving feedback, if possible * Learn not to behave in this way for others * Recognize these traits in others more quickly so you can get ahead of the behavior and in the worst case avoid those people.

I know none of this answers your question. To find an environment that you thrive in might take a good bit of trial and error over the years, plus a good bit of "character building."

He is notorious at the company for being _the_ asshole boss. Just mention his name once to employees (especially those who've been with the company for 2-3 years for instance) in other departments and while some won't say it out loud, you can tell from their face they know and they feel for you.

I apologize for the swearing. In reality, I am actually the kind of person who avoids swearing at all but this job is changing me in such terrible ways. Yes I am angry and I am desperately searching for a decent company to give me an opportunity where I can grow and contribute in a more positive environment. I am not asking for a stress-free environment (stress doesn't signal the job is bad necessarily) , I am asking for basic human courtesy and professionalism.

You know its so funny. I love the company itself and the product. They truly have some innovative technology (as cliche as that sounds).Though, I think the lesson I've learned from all this is that I need to look at my manager(s) as MUCH as (or more than) I look at the product or my salary.

- Unreasonable demands (be available 24/7, when that wasn't clear up front or isn't a normal part of the position).

- Stabbing you in the back to make the boss look good.

- Verbal (or even physical!) abuse.

- Lying to you.

Note well: No resemblance to my current boss, and very little to any boss I've ever had.

I don't have much advice to offer with your main question, after all I'm only a few years out of uni so I'm barely a step or two ahead of you on the same road. But I have this to say: you're not "pretty average"; you're just starting out. You'll get a lot better and then things will get a lot better for you.

I also valued myself pretty low when I started out so I ended up with jerks for bosses a couple of times, but eventually I built up the skills to have a bit more choice on the teams I was working for. At that point I found a team with a senior engineer who became a true mentor to me and taught me a metric ton of shit I'll be using to the end of my working days.

I think folks in this industry make the mistake of valuing innate talent above hard work. It's true there's people who have that sort of magical talent and godspeed to them. The vast majority of us though have to slog it out, and learn as much as we can on the job and as we go. What "pretty average engineer" really means is "bursting at the seams with potential to be a great engineer with strong skills" a few years down the line.

Also: good luck out there. It gets better :)

We all end up in situations we don't expect. While bad leadership is hard to overcome, it's a great learning opportunity. Now that you are there focus on improving yourself.

- improve your coding, on your own time or not

- help your boss not be an asshole. or go above them. or manage them. That's a skill too.

- enjoy your paycheck, but save money

Hope that adds a slightly different perspective.

My first job fresh out of uni was in a corporate environment and while I appreciated the professionalism that came with it ("Keep an activity tracker" etc ... might horrify some people but I love making lists haha) but in the end I only stayed for 6 months. It got too corporate and suddenly I realised that a lot of people were actually feigning cheeriness when underneath they were under mighty pressure from politics. I decided quite firmly never to work for corps (that activity tracker should have warned me after all) and for a few months I freelanced until I got broke. I thought I'd give big organisations another chance and I'm glad I did. When I had the interview, it was typically based on a set of questions but the interviewers were relaxed and made warm-but-not-wacky jokes. I also remember the time when I had a sudden mind blank during a presentation and they were really amiable with it and said that it's probably better if I spend a day with the team and see if we're a match. That was probably the moment when I knew that this workplace could be a nice place to work in, because they seemed to recognise and appreciate humanness and that the interview is not just about testing me but also vice versa. So if it's possible, asking to meet your future team and seeing what the reaction to that is like could be a nice indicator of the type of culture there. And of course the actual team meeting.

I don't think there's a proper list of how to detect toxicity, so I guess you just need to keep an open eye and ear on everything which is why it's important to spend some time in the workplace. Keep alert but at the same time keep an open mind. Interestingly, a week after I joined my new workplace, the organisation did some ruthless restructuring, but which top management was very organised and empathical about it, for example there was an emphasis that we could talk about it, and comfort those who are leaving etc. It was unpleasant and initially I panicked thinking that I picked the wrong workplace again, but in the end it was educational - a couple of weeks later, the emotional negativity dissipated. I'm still new but 1.5 months later and I'm still chirpy ... well I'll take that as a good sign.

I know the ways in which I work best and I'm not afraid to let people know. That confidence makes a big difference not only in who I choose to work with, but also in how I work with others.

When gauging a new employer or coworker I decide mostly on feel. It's easy to recognize a matching relationship once you know yourself. That doesn't mean it's easy to find one.

It might not be true for everyone. In my experience, knowing myself helped a ton, and I was the only one who could figure that out. I was always told this growing up and had no idea what it meant. People telling me to "be yourself" made little sense to me until I learned more about myself.

If I had a solid answer that worked for anyone I'd be rich! Many self-help books try. 7 Habits (Covey) and How to Win Friends & Influence People (Carnegie) are two I liked.

Ultimately the question is individual, so the answer is too. I'll just say, when you know, you know. If you don't know, keep looking. So long as you're on this earth you have a chance to answer that question and many interesting others. When you do, you'll look back and be glad you tried.

I'd also say that it's a lifelong process and it seems equally possible to lose yourself. For me I was not always aware of when I started slipping.

I started doing meditation recently and found it helps settle my thoughts and become aware of when my brain was thinking things I didn't want it to. The book Mindfulness in Plain English [1] was recommended to me, and I'm about halfway through it. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in becoming more aware of themselves and others.

[1] http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html

Now that your know yourself better, are you more aware you slipping and take preventive measures early on?

Q2: Definitely. Some awareness comes from taking time to meditate, and some comes from experience. I'm not going to argue I can anticipate everything or that I've met all of life's challenges. That would be silly. But I do feel more comfortable dealing with things day-to-day and feel less of a need to plan/control the future.

2. When they negatively recruit ("Oh that other company sucks, you don't want to work for them!"), run.

3. When you look around the work environment and see everybody on 15 inch monitors, run.

4. When they have an applicant tracking system and they don't respond to you after an interview, run.

5. If they ask "What are you weaknesses?", run.

6. When they ask "How much are you making now?", run.

7. When their Glassdoor reviews are below a 3.0, run.

No seriously, if you have a bad/weird/odd/sketchy feeling when interviewing, that's all you need. Your subconscious picks up on WAY more than your conscious does and it notifies you through that "gut feeling".

So don't listen to what others in this thread are saying. Their advice comes from their experiences, which may not match yours. Only you truly know what you want.

It's good advice to trust your gut; but as Nobel prize winning psychologists discovered, trust your gut as an additional parameter to your existing rubric of tests.

Don't trust your gut while excluding everything else.

So what I do, outside of tiny startups (where I'd not go regardless, as you are in for years, and chances are you'll just be underpaid for the duration) is to go look for former employees, and ask them why they left the place, what sucks, what doesn't, and how generalized the problems are. People that have left might overestimate how bad the place is, but better an overestimation that you can temper than talking to someone that is still in love with the place, right?

This mechanism has been pretty good for me, and you can show you are a well prepared candidate by asking pointed questions about what the people that left considered the place's most glaring weaknesses.

I have been fortunate enough to be able to do this a few times in my career: In some cases, talking to my would be predecessor. It's helped me dodge big bullets, either by avoiding employers altogether, or by letting me ask for a different department/team in advance, avoiding terrible managers.

I've had ~10 jobs and 4 of them had intolerable environments. In the past few years I started vetting the companies I wanted to work at by getting in touch with current and past employees. This can give you some insight on how the place functions. I also request to visit the headquarters/office. Most companies will accommodate this. If they don't, I end the recruitment process because it's a big red flag for me.

bpchaps's bullet list is pretty good too. I've run into each of the line items in interviews. Particularly bad for me was Twilio, where the pre-screen phone interview consisted of two developers asking me trivia questions about various technologies. After the first 10 minutes I wanted to hang up. I was glad to not get an onsite. Right before Digg went under I interviewed there. There was no receptionist when I showed up, so the first interviewer (lead dev) didn't even know I was there. We started the interview 15 minutes late, and the interviewer took phone calls during the interview. I was extremely irritated, but I kept my cool.

Just remember, if you are treated in a way you don't like during the recruitment process, then you'll probably be treated in a similar manner if you become an employee.