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As a woman, I avoid companies where people use “female” as a noun when referring to humans. On a less snarky note, I’m aware of the gender balance of my interv
by gshdg 7y ago
As a woman, I avoid companies where people use “female” as a noun when referring to humans.
On a less snarky note, I’m aware of the gender balance of my interviewers. At a startup with an engineering team of 3, not having any other women is expected and can be excused; but presumably there’s at least one other woman in the company available for a culture fit interview, right? ... right?
Good signs: existence of an actual HR department (the CFO and an entry level recruiter don’t count); women holding key leadership positions; an office full of faces that reflect the gender and ethnic and age diversity of the city I live in.
Red flags: a strong alcohol culture or one that involves very long hours or lots of mandatory fun time; nobody over 30 in the office, or founders who started the company less than 5 years out of college; an imbalance of women in support roles; water cooler and lunch conversations self-sorting by gender or ethnicity.
Also, many women who have been in the workforce have developed or discovered whisper networks where we can find out about what it’s like to work at various companies.
- bwb 7y agothank you, that is helpful!! With the whisper networks, is that something where people throw out what is it like to work here? Or even so far as under specific managers? Curious what type of requests come across that.
- gshdg 7y agoDepends on the network and company. You get “has anyone worked at Acme Corp? What was it like?” And “I was there 5 years ago. Things were great in the foo department, but my friends in the bar department said the VP there did baz. Things may have changed since then, though. LMK if you want me to put you in touch with someone who still works there.” The networks also often share salary information.
- badpun 7y ago> an office full of faces that reflect the gender and ethnic and age diversity of the city I live in. That's most likely not going to happen. Tech is a demanding industry and, with age, lots of people start looking for easier/less demanding jobs, even if they pay less. That's why you may see some 60+ year old COBOL maintainers, who stepped off the tech treadmill decades ago and are just now cruising towards retirement, but you, for the most part, won't see 60 years React developers - people at this age value their sanity and don't want to run on the treadmill any more.
- gshdg 7y agoThe office presumably isn’t just the dev team, though.
- Spooky23 7y ago> That's most likely not going to happen. At a shitty company. Just went to a 60th birthday party for one of the tech leads who just finished a major rollout that impacted about 50,000 people and is standing up our SRE program.
- gshdg 7y agoOh, look, the question got edited to replace “female” with “woman”. Thank you.