▲ 6 points
Ask HN: What are the other companies you'll never work for?
What are the companies you should absolutely avoid?
Why? Culture? CEO? Management? Customers?
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8 comments
My personal opinion on what I would avoid:
- FAANG / BAT: too large, I don't want to tell people that my work was handling validation of 17th form in Adwords extended preferences screen for Tier-3 partners;
- any kind of surveillance / anti-privacy tech, including all those "we help companies understand their employees better" and "we make workers more productive" etc, all kinds of ad-matching platforms, behavioral analysis and so on;
- generally anything advertisement-related;
- anything military- or defense-related;
- anything by ex-Wework and Uber because of how toxic work culture was / is in those (just IMO);
- sweatshops like Luxoft, Crossover etc;
- probably would avoid corporates like Citi, McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte etc;
- anything that produces cheaply in China and sells outside;
- would be very careful with anything invested by Softbank directly or through a proxy fund...
Hahaha, so probably starting a business or working for a NGO with a good cause is the only way.
> FAANG / BAT
I suppose that YMMV, it really depends on the team and product. I worked for one of the letters you failed to mentioned an had a fair share of influence on the final product
BAT = Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent?
Thanks, I search for it and all I could find was "British American Tobacco"
Right! Well, anyway, what I meant was the Big Co. where it's hard to make any practical difference or be heard, unless you're in the top layer.
I can give the same answer here that I give to recruiters. The job I do has to improve the world somehow. It doesn't have to be some profound world-changing project, but it has to be a net positive. For example, the project I've been on for the last 7 years moves paper-based processes in small government to online processes. Less waste, saves them money. Doesn't solve the big problems of the world, but at least is one small positive step.
I will consider any job that can make that same claim. And I'll reject jobs that cannot.
CEO and culture will make me do better homework before and during the interview process, but will not stop me from working for such a company.
I would avoid everything related to betting, I can't justify to myself abusing people's weaknesses. There are grey areas like esports involving money
I would have to think twice about companies or teams building "content recommendation", online ads or anything else that spies on individuals for the soul purpose of making more money
Brightcove. Completely terrible company - some of the most cliquey, horrible people I've ever had the displeasure of working with.