4 ms·

Dogpiling onto the well-wishing. Having recently been through a bit of interviews at various places, can't help but wonder - how does (and is it even possible)

Dogpiling onto the well-wishing. Having recently been through a bit of interviews at various places, can't help but wonder - how does (and is it even possible) a candidate defect this toxicity or the interview stage? With the 20/20 hindsight, were there any tell-tale signs?

batt4good 7y ago
I have very limited experience, but the few that jump out to me emanate from a few conversations I had with employees during my on-site. For context, the role was for a "Golang / Elixir Engineer" during my onsite all anyone talked about was relatively new code written in Ruby and only mentioned Golang or Elixir in a "maybe 8 months down the road" way. Language barrier with your manager seems innocuous, but the problems I ran into were deeper and seemingly cultural. (she expected to only be told things were going right, nothing was ever her fault, asking for help is indicative of weakness or incompetence etc. - I'm trying to not sound racist but other employees had similar comments) Also, it took me quite a bit of time to work through the mental gymnastics as to whether I was just bad at my job or if I was in a toxic environment. In hindsight it was definitely toxic - as an example senior engineers on my teams were being put in a position where they had to make decisions TPM's should be making (but still hung out when they made the wrong decisions).
- T3OU-736 7y ago
  So, nothing _really_ jumped out, though there were weak clues/hints. I am not a coder, so it isn't obvious to me that a mention of a technology being "8 months down the road" is unreasonable. But now it would be. Language (and, it appears, also a culture) barrier with management is... tricky since we don't want to come off as racist/*-ist. Not sure how to evaluate it, aside from asking scenario questions if the manager. Maybe if there manager, during their interview, didn't care about finding the candidate's behavior when they reached their knowledge limits is another sign?

batt4good 7y ago

I have very limited experience, but the few that jump out to me emanate from a few conversations I had with employees during my on-site. For context, the role was for a "Golang / Elixir Engineer" during my onsite all anyone talked about was relatively new code written in Ruby and only mentioned Golang or Elixir in a "maybe 8 months down the road" way. Language barrier with your manager seems innocuous, but the problems I ran into were deeper and seemingly cultural. (she expected to only be told things were going right, nothing was ever her fault, asking for help is indicative of weakness or incompetence etc. - I'm trying to not sound racist but other employees had similar comments) Also, it took me quite a bit of time to work through the mental gymnastics as to whether I was just bad at my job or if I was in a toxic environment. In hindsight it was definitely toxic - as an example senior engineers on my teams were being put in a position where they had to make decisions TPM's should be making (but still hung out when they made the wrong decisions).

T3OU-736 7y ago
So, nothing _really_ jumped out, though there were weak clues/hints. I am not a coder, so it isn't obvious to me that a mention of a technology being "8 months down the road" is unreasonable. But now it would be. Language (and, it appears, also a culture) barrier with management is... tricky since we don't want to come off as racist/*-ist. Not sure how to evaluate it, aside from asking scenario questions if the manager. Maybe if there manager, during their interview, didn't care about finding the candidate's behavior when they reached their knowledge limits is another sign?