I think one red flag that people often miss, or make excuses for, is this: management not treating a coworker fairly.
When you're not treated fairly, that's clearly a red flag. But many people see coworkers treated poorly while they themselves aren't, grab a beer after work and talk about it, commiserate etc. but don't consider the possibility that maybe they themselves are next.
This is one of the reasons I left a startup. As an example, bonuses were promised to the hourly employees if a specific deadline was met. Deadline was met, backpedaling ensued and no bonus awarded after the fact. (I was full-time, so not eligible in any case, but I didn't want to work for someone I couldn't trust)
Holy crap, I think my last boss made that article his guiding philosophy. Haven't talked to the guy for years, and still recovering from that job. I'd guess that there's some personality defect that makes a person especially vulnerable to those tactics, but I can definitely say that they worked on me.
Man, I have been there. After I finished my training, I started working as a programmer at a small company, and I had this supervisor whose strategy of dealing with people was exactly as described in this article.
Even worse, he enjoyed it, thoroughly. Such people should never ever be allowed to get anywhere near a position of power over other people.
Thank you for posting this link. It's one of the best things I've ever read while browsing HN. Reminds me very, very strongly of a software company where I once worked.
Wow. This is my current situation. While I knew things were bad and I need to move on to better things, I never fully understood the reasons. This article explains it concisely.
I've been through a few startups, but one experience really has stuck with me. I was an early employee in a turnkey software startup built on ideas from a moderately noted researcher in the field the software was designed to sell to. I had known the researcher off and on over the years and he had been brought on as the CTO with the investors bringing in an outside person they knew as the CEO.
They were still in "stealth mode" at this time, taking some earlier work the researcher had spent time on and hardening it for general commercial sale. This was the first red flag I should have seen, instead of taking the time to reboot the product and start it over for a modern market, the development team was spending a year doing bug fixes and cleaning up broken research code.
Not long after starting I went with the CTO to a trade show for market research and meet and greets with some industry partners. He booked us a lavish 4-star hotel and during a week-long trip maybe spent 2 hours at the show. He couldn't get out of there fast enough and instead wanted to rent a conference room outside the city and spend the week brainstorming product ideas. Remember, he had directed the dev team to not develop a new product but to merely fix and update his old code. He then described some new ideas that I recognized as being more or less exactly like a competing product. I asked him to describe how we would differentiate it from that product. Instead he claimed it was a totally different idea. Red flags #2, #3 and 4
And it went on a for a while, intense conflicts between the CTO and the dev manager put development work into a holding pattern, lack of a good sales strategy, and so on.
Eventually there was complete turnover at the C-level and the investors brought in a new team, they asked me to stay on while they rebooted the company so I did, and we did better, almost turned it around. But by that time we were stuck with a huge legacy codebase dwindling investment dollars and a host of other problems that we could never seem to shake.
Despite being a bad experience, I learned more from that failed company than I've learned in the other 15 years of work. Observing so many failure modes happening all at once, and seeing how a pro-team might go about a turn-around has taught me an entire business school's worth of street smarts.
I'd almost recommend riding a company down like that to people serious about startups so they can learn the same things, but to be honest, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
I've been planning on writing something for a while, but there's still some things going on with some of the IP (now years later) and I've found it hard to write about it in an "internet safe" abstract way.
One thing that really turns me off is when people talk really negatively about former employees.
I met a CTO of a company in Toronto who told me how his predecessor had set up MySQL all wrong. I pressed him for details, and it was not setup any differently to how I would have. This was not in the context of an interview, but it left a very lasting negative impression.
One of the things I eventually realized was that -- maybe not for everyone, for all programs, but certainly for a lot of people -- the programs we write are very incomplete. There's a portion that we write down, that the machine runs, and then there's a portion that's only in our head.
When you've got both portions, everything is awesome. I'd worth with a guy for years, and never had a problem with them. If I was working with some code they wrote and didn't get what was going on, I'd ask them, they'd explain, it'd make sense, and everything would be fine.
Then they'd leave, and I'd no longer have access to the portion of the program in their head, and the code they'd left behind would become worthless crap. The structuring was all wrong, the choice of variable names idiotic, the corner cases they handled seemed trivial and the ones left unhandled, crucial.
Maybe there's something wrong with everyone I used to work with (as I tended to think the first time or two this happened), maybe if we were better and writing documentation this wouldn't happen. But it is very, very easy to be given a codebase from a former employee -- a perfectly fine codebase written by a perfectly competent employee -- and conclude they are an idiot, because you're missing the portion that's in their head.
So absolutely true. But I think the best programmers strive to minimize the portion of the program that resides in their heads, and maximize the ease with which it can be recreated in someone else's.
First comment about employers treating a coworker badly. It's a good general rule, if someone does something nasty to someone else, stick around and they'll do it to you too.
I agree completely. Bitterness or negativity toward people who leave for normal reasons is a common sign of a bad company. Also, when people speak negatively of the person who's in some way my predecessor in a role, I tend to wonder if they're going to say the same things about me in the future.
I went through this recently and was very put off by it. A team member left for a (dramatically better paying) position elsewhere. The day after that team member left, our manager was making it very clear that they had left us to work on something trivial (and maybe they did, but it's no one else's business) while we were left behind working on Things That Really Matter (medical devices). It wasn't the first time that a Senior Manager at this place was trying to convince the team that "...what we do is making a difference."
"But ALWAYS trust your gut on NOT to do something."
Having learnt that lesson the hard way, I whole-heartedly agree. Our "gut" is the equivalent of a supercomputer against the hand-held, battery-powered rational part of our minds. And it is there for a reason. If your "gut" screams at you to just run, you should at least seriously consider walking away. Every time I failed to do so, I came to regret it.
I'm really not happy with this assumption that you've got this incredible intuitive part of your mind that can predict things with uncanny accuracy when we can't reason through it. Snap judgements of situations are also well known to be extremely wrong. Ever judged a book by its cover and been wrong?
Could your experience here be confirmation bias? You remember the cases where you felt you should run but didn't and it went wrong, and forget those where you felt you should run but didn't and everything was just fine?
The other side is that if you leave, it's very hard to say what would have happened otherwise. You may feel you've dodged a bullet when there was in reality no gun.
"Gut feeling" is often boils down to a "compressed" rapid response, based on all of our previous experience, without having to go through all the reasoning and debating that we usually do.
And the quality of that response can be heavily dependent on how much we've been in a similar situation. Daniel Kahneman talks about this in "Thinking, Fast and Slow".
It makes sense that quick reactions can be good if they're responding to things we have done many, many times before. It also makes sense that quick reactions can be very poor if they're responding to things that we've not done much.
It's not that it can predict things it's that it sees things you consciously miss.
It's the reason why you might get the feeling someone is lying to you without being able to name every single piece of body language that told you why.
Do you think that cognitive biases (like anchoring, for example) don't have any evidence for them? Do you disagree that humans have high false positive rates when looking for patterns (like the classic gamblers fallacy)?
I think you're asking questions so you can find an answer to attack. It's an old and boring way to argue on the internet.
The truth is nothing is perfect, the reason these discussions don't go anywhere is because you're going to insist on finding the imperfections and then try to exploit that to win.
That is your right, but I explained both what it is, and why it's often correct.
I'm just too old to let myself get pulled into one of these discussions, sorry.
I'm sorry you feel that way, I'm just trying to find out where we might disagree. Those two questions where the ones I thought would be key points on which we might disagree and would get us closer to understanding where we both stand rather than stopping because I found someone that disagreed with me. I don't want to ignore opportunities to find out I'm wrong, or find another side to things I'd not considered.
The ways in which we respond to things instinctively is a topic I find both fascinating and incredibly important. Personally I think there is enough evidence to suggest we should be highly wary of ways in which we think that we don't carefully analyse. If I'm wrong I could be ignoring a very powerful way of quickly responding to things. I think that people who rely on gut instinct are putting themselves at risk of making worse decisions on important issues, or trusting others that operate in the same way.
I'm not going to keep poking, because there's no joy in talking to someone that doesn't want to respond, and certainly no joy in talking to someone who thinks that a discussion or debate is either something to be won or something where neither person should expect to come out with a different opinion.
> Your execs with spook connections arrange for your crooked embezzling CEO to meet with someone in the WTC on 2001 September 11 (true story - but he escaped...)
"But ALWAYS trust your gut on NOT to do something. If your gut tells you to not work at a particular company (or to stop dating someone), trust it implicitly as your gut is much better at saving your life than it is at figuring up upside opportunities."
The problem with this is that we have no data on people who had a gut feeling that something was not right but were wrong about that gut feeling. People would tend to talk about times when "I should have listened to my gut about this" but rarely would tend to talk about when their gut was wrong and they were worried for nothing. (And I can think of several personal examples of this type of thing.).
That doesn't really contradict his point. It's all about probabilistic expectation. Presumably you have a myriad of options to choose from. If you have a bad gut feeling about one, move on. Obviously there will be counter examples to where this was not the optimal choice, but it is a valid heuristic. Generally in most peoples lives, there is more to lose than there is to gain. You want to skew decision making to minimize potential loss.
Once again, there will be exceptions and people where such an approach isn't ideal.
Ok that is fine but where is the correlation between what someone feels in their gut and what ends up being true in the end?
Plus, what is the downside risk of being overly cautious since that has to be factored in.
If the gut is based on things that you have observed in the past, or your personal experiences, then it is also possible that you will jump the gun by being overly sensitive and matching a pattern incorrectly. [1] In that case you could be wrong. I guess what I am saying is "it's not that simple" as trite advice typically makes it sound.
"minimize potential loss" also means "avoid potential gain".
[1] This actually happened to me and although this is just a single example which I highlight and where I choose to ignore the gut and plug on, in my particular case I am glad that I had done so. (Was with a relationship..).
Actually, your brain/gut is a parallel supercomputer. If your "gut" tells you that this is a bad situation, it probably is correct, even though you may not consciously know the reason. Your gut is processing a lot of information based on your experience, some of which you may not know consciously.
I don't have that problem so much anymore. When my gut tells me something is wrong, I usually also have a conscious logical reason. It takes a lot of self-awareness, though.
Not a red flag, but you should always know what your next-best alternative is. The best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA), prevents you from agreeing to something that is actually worse than just walking out when you are negotiating something - like a job.
Had that happen with me. Someone I grew up with up held a high position at a consulting firm, and was recruiting developers. He told me that they kept having problems of people who simply wouldn't show up to work. My guess was they got burned out due to the work. Kept on with the interview process and got a ridiculously good, but unofficial offer via email. However, in order to fully get the offer, I'd have to quit my current job first, let the new company know that I have, and then let the new company contact my now former boss for a reference. I vehemently protested against this and they backed down on it. The final nail in the coffin came when I pressed to know what city my first assignment would be in, and they wouldn't tell me. Very shady, and I can't believe some companies could operate like this. For what it's worth, my friend just recently quit from the company as well.
A company using the label "startup" is a fascinating red flag in and of itself. It means bad pay and worthless options. It's amazing how well startup recruiters and VCs have hyped the startup experience.
A caveat of the popular "would you invest in this company?" question: it's not a good litmus test for "should I work at this company?" because you're not a VC. If you're considering employment, it strongly suggests you don't have as much money as an angel or VC, which puts you in a different position. Losing $100,000 might not make a VC with $100MM of other peoples' money bat an eye, but what about you?
What about when you notice the politics that creeps in when the firm grows? The culture can easily change from a single team on a mission to competing teams, which often isn't comfortable for people.
I'd like to offer a simple red flag that I haven't seen mentioned enough: deception. If management is hiding information or providing misleading information to employees - even on small issues - it's a huge red flag. First, it says they're not confident in the reality of the situation. Second, people who are deceptive about small issues will also be deceptive about big issues that really matter to you. Deceptive people usually start their deceptions small and then increase them as they lead you down a long, annoying path to failure.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of deceptive people in business, so avoiding them entirely is not always possible. If you're forced to deal with them, my best advice is to be on guard. Be aware of what you have at steak if they turn on you and only work with them as much as required.
1) Communication during the hiring process. There's not much else that should be more important to the startup at that moment than you. If they are not fighting to hold your interest you should walk (unless they have a damned good explanation).
2) If you ask the MD what their turnover is and they cannot answer the question coherently.
Lawyers are often known assholes, and in most cases have fun pretty much exclusively at other's expense. I hope their jobs aren't fun, because when it is, it can be deeply disturbing.
Doctors can assuredly have fun in responsible ways, and you know what? I want my doctor to be a happy person who enjoys their livelihood, because if they aren't happy... well...
The working poor are an explicit example of what becomes of you, should you find yourself lashed to unsavory tasks as a life sentence. Very obviously no fun. What little fun there may be, is incidental. Asking that question is sort of tone deaf. Like asking:
Well what about the cow in the barn? Is she on board
with becoming a hamburger after she's done giving us
all that milk? We'd better ask.
One has to assume that no one aspires to a life of working poverty. It just sort of happens to you, like a cruel prank. Possibly as a direct result of lawyers having fun.
Medicine stops being fun about 2 weeks into internship. It gets much more fun after that... but there are times when it's not fun. Same with research. Same with business. There are times when things aren't fun.
Sometimes it takes discipline to continue when things aren't fun in pursuit of a goal that is noble (or fun).
When you're not treated fairly, that's clearly a red flag. But many people see coworkers treated poorly while they themselves aren't, grab a beer after work and talk about it, commiserate etc. but don't consider the possibility that maybe they themselves are next.