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Ask HN: Are these signs of a toxic company?
This is my first job, I have recently joined as a full-time developer a small software company working in a niche sector I like.
However, just around my 1st month I started noticing some things, and was wondering if these could be signs of a toxic place:
* The number of people working in sales is double the people working on the actual product.
* Many interns and temp workers for a company of this size.
* No coding styles, CI or tooling conventions are implemented (causing many issues).
* Internal conflicts between senior developers and managers that result in heated arguments and/or emails.
* I was given low-performance hardware (that makes my compiling/testing time twice as much as my actual coding time) due to budget.
* Marketing and sales people have (implicit and explicit) privileged treatment compared to developer teams.
On the other hand, most people are really nice and the team I have been assigned to has been really helpful getting me up to speed.
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Am I reading too much into this, or are these signs of a sinking ship that I should abandon while I can?
I'm using a throwaway account for obvious reasons.
- pinewurst 10y agoThe 1st one (ratio of sales to development) is not a problem, assuming that the sales people aren't individually dead wood. Any reasonable sales organization rewards the good ones and purges the non-performers periodically.
- throwAwayQA 10y agoI'm not too familiar with these people as they're scattered over different offices. They seem competent though. But in my mind (and i may be biased) I believe that you should invest in the team building the actual product before investing in the team selling it.
- angersock 10y agoYou're incorrect here, though well-meaning. :) The ideal setup, from a company's perspective, is one engineer and as many sales people as it takes to sell the product. How the product is made--and hence the team that makes it!--is of no consequence provided the company can sell the product. The product doesn't even have to work: you just need people willing to pay for it.
- throwAwayQA 10y agoI absolutely get what you're meaning, but this is not very "comforting" for an engineer.
- angersock 10y agoAgreed. :( This should probably be on the short list of reasons we have so much burnout in our sector.
- calcsam 10y agoI wouldn't say it's a toxic company or sinking ship, but from the three points below they don't seem to value engineering much. As it's your first job, so you probably don't have a ton of leverage -- though if you had other offers, I would consider re-opening conversations with them, and if you can find a new job pretty quickly, you can just leave this job off your resume in the future. * No coding styles, CI or tooling conventions are implemented (causing many issues). * I was given low-performance hardware (that makes my compiling/testing time twice as much as my actual coding time) due to budget. * Marketing and sales people have (implicit and explicit) privileged treatment compared to developer teams.
- throwAwayQA 10y agoThe problem is, whenever I try to introduce some tools that could solve an actual problem I get dismissed as I'm new, thus making solving these issues an almost impossible task for now.
- calcsam 10y agoNot sure what you're responding to -- my advice was to look elsewhere & reopen convos with other companies.