new dilemma
Now i have two job offers.
The interview last week with the C-levels at the Silicon Valleyish company went fairly well. The COO was the third person at the company to ask about the "short" stints on my résumé, by which i assume they meant the 11 month and the 5 month roles i had while i lived in China. The 11 month role was an average workplace where i unfortunately had a terrible project manager, and i naïvely thought it would be better literally anywhere else. It wasn't, because the subsequent 5 month role was an absolute disaster and a staggeringly toxic workplace. I would have been better off powering through at the original place before switching to my last role in China where i survived 15 months, which i consider to be a perfectly reasonable length in the tech industry. But hey - you live, you learn. Sadly China is a country where abusive micromanagers thrive, and you need to be able to spot when you are dealing with just a medium level asshat, since that's still far more tolerable than a maximum level asshat.
I hope that Taiwanese office culture is less tolerant of asshats.
Certainly the CEO at the Silicon Valleyish company did a lot to soothe my nerves. Despite him being a Y Combinator alumnus with a successful exit early in his career, and his overt techno-libertarian leanings on social media, he did come across well. And he revealed a key point that increased my confidence - the company is profitable, and it is no longer living off VC. No Series A yet, so there is no need to try to maximize growth, and the goal is to just cruise along "default alive" at least until the current economic wobble passes.
That also meant there was now less differentiation between the two options, since working for a profitable company makes me feel a lot more comfortable than getting back into the epic suck of venture capital and stock market wank.
Now, bear in mind, i still haven't had a paper offer from the European company yet, so i don't know their benefits (notably take-home pay and annual leave), but i am going to assume it's in the same ballpark.
So we have two companies. Let's call them A (Silicon Valley) and B (Europe).
A is around 50 people, of whom i met over 10 already. The hiring process was super-communicative. Messaging almost every day. 1 screening and 5 main interviews, plus the hiring manager got in touch to make the offer. From the recruitment website to the interviews, everything was transparent and a real emphasis was placed on touchy-feely stuff like communication inside and outside the team, how to give and receive feedback et cetera. Feels like a typical warm and fuzzy super-woke tech company, although having worked at several of those i also know that a lot of the apparent kindness is ultimately fake. Still, it's probably nicer to be around people who pretend to be kind than people who don't give any shits at all. But. It is also just a "standard" SAAS product. Yeah, it's small, so i'll avoid the overcomplicated wank that happens in companies where douchebag engineers (incorrectly) believe they need to operate at Google-scale, but it's still just building a fucking webapp. I'll probably need to implement tracking everywhere, even though it isn't an adtech company, because that's what all webapps do nowadays. The hiring manager was honest when he said i should expect 20-30% meetings. That's a lot of fucking meetings for an individual contributor. Also it's an "infinite annual leave" company, which sounds awesome in theory, but in practice it makes me suspicious. Especially when the company is registered in the US, a country where it's perfectly legal to not give your employees any fucking annual leave at all.
B is around 400 people, of whom i only met 4. 1 screening and 2 main interviews, then they went silent for 7 days and only got back to me when i wrote them to say that A had made me an offer. To their credit, they made me an offer within 24 hours. (I will be on a call tonight to confirm the details.) The interviews were much more businesslike. Not in a negative way, but in a way that felt more old-fashioned to me. Like tech job interviews used to be 15 years ago, not like they are now. There wasn't any talk about relationships between teams or different departments. There are no product managers. Most teams apparently just have one meeting a week. Maybe a daily standup if they decide they need one, but that's it. The people who interviewed me had really interesting backgrounds on LinkedIn, working at research institutions, open source software, government and so on. They asked me a lot about "many hats" stuff. Not just programming, but database administration, networking, operating systems... And the product is built to be respectful of the users' privacy - there is explicitly no tracking and no ads. I wouldn't feel like a sellout working there. Hell, it's a product i am a customer of myself.
It seems like a no-brainer. B is the company for me. The technology will be far more interesting to me. I will be working on stuff that i haven't done for almost 10 years. It might be a way to slowly bend my career back toward open source and "real" back end coding, instead of the sort of tedious snapping together of Google- or Amazon-branded blocks that modern cloud computing is all about. But i am worried about the culture. On one hand no meetings sounds great. No product managers. It's pure techy people doing techy stuff! But that only works if all the people are professional. If you get an asshole in that environment, it turns into a mega asshole situation. Yeah, i find the incessant walking on eggshells that characterizes modern tech companies to be puerile and timewasting, but at least those 27 meetings per week and fluffy codes of conduct can help to encourage a culture that isn't completely toxic. It might be cringeworthy, but on balance that's still better for everyone's mental health.
So, i am afraid. I am afraid because i have worked at a couple of "oldskool" tech companies that turned awful (and one that was awful from the outset), whereas every "newskool" tech company was in the worst case just cloyingly mediocre. Going back to an "oldskool" company runs the risk of me getting another 5 month stint on my résumé. And no matter how respectful i am, i will probably burn the bridge at the company whose offer i turn down. So what do i do? Do i pick the safe option? The known quantity? Or do i risk it on something that i think could be much closer to what i want to do career-wise? I mean, especially given that at the root of it... i wish i didn't have to work at all.
It'd be a lot easier if i was either purely mercenary in my job search - only looking for money and career advancement - or if i was truly passionate about building a certain type of software in particular.
I suppose i'll know more after my meeting to confirm the offer tonight. But, unless the annual leave is unacceptable (3 weeks is depressingly low, 2 would be unacceptable), i don't think it will tip the scale.
Ugh. I don't know. I need chocolate.
The interview last week with the C-levels at the Silicon Valleyish company went fairly well. The COO was the third person at the company to ask about the "short" stints on my résumé, by which i assume they meant the 11 month and the 5 month roles i had while i lived in China. The 11 month role was an average workplace where i unfortunately had a terrible project manager, and i naïvely thought it would be better literally anywhere else. It wasn't, because the subsequent 5 month role was an absolute disaster and a staggeringly toxic workplace. I would have been better off powering through at the original place before switching to my last role in China where i survived 15 months, which i consider to be a perfectly reasonable length in the tech industry. But hey - you live, you learn. Sadly China is a country where abusive micromanagers thrive, and you need to be able to spot when you are dealing with just a medium level asshat, since that's still far more tolerable than a maximum level asshat.
I hope that Taiwanese office culture is less tolerant of asshats.
Certainly the CEO at the Silicon Valleyish company did a lot to soothe my nerves. Despite him being a Y Combinator alumnus with a successful exit early in his career, and his overt techno-libertarian leanings on social media, he did come across well. And he revealed a key point that increased my confidence - the company is profitable, and it is no longer living off VC. No Series A yet, so there is no need to try to maximize growth, and the goal is to just cruise along "default alive" at least until the current economic wobble passes.
That also meant there was now less differentiation between the two options, since working for a profitable company makes me feel a lot more comfortable than getting back into the epic suck of venture capital and stock market wank.
Now, bear in mind, i still haven't had a paper offer from the European company yet, so i don't know their benefits (notably take-home pay and annual leave), but i am going to assume it's in the same ballpark.
So we have two companies. Let's call them A (Silicon Valley) and B (Europe).
A is around 50 people, of whom i met over 10 already. The hiring process was super-communicative. Messaging almost every day. 1 screening and 5 main interviews, plus the hiring manager got in touch to make the offer. From the recruitment website to the interviews, everything was transparent and a real emphasis was placed on touchy-feely stuff like communication inside and outside the team, how to give and receive feedback et cetera. Feels like a typical warm and fuzzy super-woke tech company, although having worked at several of those i also know that a lot of the apparent kindness is ultimately fake. Still, it's probably nicer to be around people who pretend to be kind than people who don't give any shits at all. But. It is also just a "standard" SAAS product. Yeah, it's small, so i'll avoid the overcomplicated wank that happens in companies where douchebag engineers (incorrectly) believe they need to operate at Google-scale, but it's still just building a fucking webapp. I'll probably need to implement tracking everywhere, even though it isn't an adtech company, because that's what all webapps do nowadays. The hiring manager was honest when he said i should expect 20-30% meetings. That's a lot of fucking meetings for an individual contributor. Also it's an "infinite annual leave" company, which sounds awesome in theory, but in practice it makes me suspicious. Especially when the company is registered in the US, a country where it's perfectly legal to not give your employees any fucking annual leave at all.
B is around 400 people, of whom i only met 4. 1 screening and 2 main interviews, then they went silent for 7 days and only got back to me when i wrote them to say that A had made me an offer. To their credit, they made me an offer within 24 hours. (I will be on a call tonight to confirm the details.) The interviews were much more businesslike. Not in a negative way, but in a way that felt more old-fashioned to me. Like tech job interviews used to be 15 years ago, not like they are now. There wasn't any talk about relationships between teams or different departments. There are no product managers. Most teams apparently just have one meeting a week. Maybe a daily standup if they decide they need one, but that's it. The people who interviewed me had really interesting backgrounds on LinkedIn, working at research institutions, open source software, government and so on. They asked me a lot about "many hats" stuff. Not just programming, but database administration, networking, operating systems... And the product is built to be respectful of the users' privacy - there is explicitly no tracking and no ads. I wouldn't feel like a sellout working there. Hell, it's a product i am a customer of myself.
It seems like a no-brainer. B is the company for me. The technology will be far more interesting to me. I will be working on stuff that i haven't done for almost 10 years. It might be a way to slowly bend my career back toward open source and "real" back end coding, instead of the sort of tedious snapping together of Google- or Amazon-branded blocks that modern cloud computing is all about. But i am worried about the culture. On one hand no meetings sounds great. No product managers. It's pure techy people doing techy stuff! But that only works if all the people are professional. If you get an asshole in that environment, it turns into a mega asshole situation. Yeah, i find the incessant walking on eggshells that characterizes modern tech companies to be puerile and timewasting, but at least those 27 meetings per week and fluffy codes of conduct can help to encourage a culture that isn't completely toxic. It might be cringeworthy, but on balance that's still better for everyone's mental health.
So, i am afraid. I am afraid because i have worked at a couple of "oldskool" tech companies that turned awful (and one that was awful from the outset), whereas every "newskool" tech company was in the worst case just cloyingly mediocre. Going back to an "oldskool" company runs the risk of me getting another 5 month stint on my résumé. And no matter how respectful i am, i will probably burn the bridge at the company whose offer i turn down. So what do i do? Do i pick the safe option? The known quantity? Or do i risk it on something that i think could be much closer to what i want to do career-wise? I mean, especially given that at the root of it... i wish i didn't have to work at all.
It'd be a lot easier if i was either purely mercenary in my job search - only looking for money and career advancement - or if i was truly passionate about building a certain type of software in particular.
I suppose i'll know more after my meeting to confirm the offer tonight. But, unless the annual leave is unacceptable (3 weeks is depressingly low, 2 would be unacceptable), i don't think it will tip the scale.
Ugh. I don't know. I need chocolate.