This is probably hard for most engineers to relate to, unless part of your role is doing support. edit: when I say something is not insane or unexpected, I mea

This is probably hard for most engineers to relate to, unless part of your role is doing support. edit: when I say something is not insane or unexpected, I mean it in the context of a person looking for work in customer support. These are the things you run in to. So if you are shocked that they have to provide their own hardware, then you are shocked at the way support people are often actually treated. I'm not advocating for or supporting that. The interview process and criteria for being hired have really high variance compared to engineering interviews. The author of this piece made the classic, and often unavoidable mistake of being between a rock and a hard place and not vetting the company she interviewed at and ultimately worked for for a day. Even if you're not an engineer/designer/data scientist (or one of the typically highly desired people for a startup), you should be working at places you love and believe in, when you're not, you end up having bad experiences and those bad experiences are amplified by the environment. First, I didn't find Ajay's interview to be that weird, saying why you came up with the idea for your company and your qualifications should be expected, not interpreted as a way for the founder to diminish the potential future employee. If you don't believe in your leaders, and don't trust them, you are in a lot of trouble. edit: I think that not having interviewed with the actual support team members is a huge red flag here as well, but owing to the author's somewhat desperate situation, they moved forward anyways. 12 hour days is insane, and wrong. Having to provide your own device is not really that insane for small teams. Obviously it's great if a company provides it, and probably larger companies should always provide a workstation, but this doesn't come across as totally abnormal. The constant "want to hear a joke" and racist/sexist tone at the company is also not acceptable, but clearly was supported by the people working there at the time, if the anecdote is taken at face value. It's super easy to pay for a trial period, and as far as I'm aware, it's not even legal to have people work for free unless you are a nonprofit or government organization, so that's shady, even if only for one day. I've done two week trials that were fully paid, and it was a great way to get a feel for the company and vice versa. Not having any onboarding, given that the trial was for a day isn't too surprising, but that is clearly a problem with a one day trial. They should have absolutely been given some lead-in material to help them get prepped before starting. There appear to be a lot of growing pains at Handy, which isn't a surprise, but hopefully they can move fast and get their support/service wing to be as tight and focused as the rest of their team (assuming that is true).