Get hired but don’t get burned.

It is incredibly difficult to find a good place to work. With companies that fire women after they announce that they’re pregnant, intimidate women into leaving, hire people who think it’s ok to compare women to programming tools, and have abysmally low diversity numbers (although at 10% women in tech, I am no longer surprised by Twitter’s terrible block policy), it’s surprisingly easy to end up working in a toxic environment.

How do you sniff out culture smells and determine if a company’s work environment will be toxic to you? A large part of this depends on what you expect for your work environment, but there are a few questions you can use to screen companies.

Whilst this is written by an engineer primarily for engineers, these questions and techniques are incredibly useful for any employee, at any company. You should, of course, pick and choose the things that matter to you most when interviewing.

Diversity

Don’t beat around the bush. Ask. If they don’t like the questions, then you don’t want to work there.

• Why do you think diversity in the workforce is important?
• What are your goals for increasing diversity?
• How do you define “diversity”?
• What community organizations do you sponsor?
• Do you have a parental, maternity, or paternity leave policy?
• Do you have trans-inclusive healthcare?
Do you have lactation rooms on site?
• What internal employee resource groups do you have?
• What does success in regards to diversity at company look like to you?

Things to look out for

• Is the executive team involved in the hiring process? At large companies, probably not. At small companies, meet them if you can and ask the above questions. Their answers set the trend for their departments, or potentially the entire company.
• Does the executive team support the diversity initiatives? Are they supporting the initiatives through the promotion of token individuals? Are they supportive for the praise, or is it altruistic?
• Average employee age: are there no workers above 40 (or even 30) below the executive level? Is the exec team, excluding founders, substantially older than the entirety of the workforce?
• Does the race/gender of the executive team and management skew in one direction? Is it reflective of the company as a whole? Is their swag all unisex or men’s?
• Are there “token” women, POC, or other underrepresented group in management positions?

Do they value employees?

Questions

• Do you provide job training for employees?
• Do employees have a training budget?
• What career paths are available from this position?

Things to look out for

• How are the lowest-level employees treated? Do they receive the same perks as engineers?
• Which departments have training budgets?
• Do they hire only experienced workers? Do they hire only new graduates?
• Do low- and entry-level employees have career paths?
• Are they promoting internally, or hiring externally?
• Who hangs out with who? Who eats lunch together? What after-work activities do people do together?
• Are people friends across departments, or are they completely isolated from one another?

Human Resources

Questions

• How does HR handle internal complaints?Do they have a policy on inter-office relationships?
• How familiar are you with the ADA, FMLA, and other similar laws that protect workers rights?
• Are employee salaries confidential information? Note: This is likely illegal, see here for details, or the National Labor Relations Act.

note: I know I am currently working in the UK, but since I have spent most of my engineering career in the US (my home country) I am pretty much only familiar with US laws, please check back- as I am learning as I go.

Things to look out for

Look for HR anti patterns. This is the most important thing you can do - I have no other advice for you here except that you read that article.

Additional reading

• Hire More Women
  
• Why do we only care about programmers?
  
• When it comes to diversity, what does success look like?
  
• The responsibility of ‘diversity’