Technology | Money | Job Search
5 More Red Flags of Terrible IT Company
More sharp and clear than the previous ones.
Who said that a company has to choose from many candidates? Power in the market belongs to those who are in demand. Now qualified developers are in demand. Thus, they choose from a set of companies, not vice versa.
There are thousands of companies on the market. They all need awesome developers. They all need you. But developers don’t want to work for some companies. There are reasons for this.
Here are 4 red flags of terrible company you don’t want to work for.
Unpaid extra hours and overtime
Nobody likes to work for free. Also, people don’t like to work more than agreed. The worst case is to work more and for free.
Overtime is an important thing to discuss during the interview.
- Does the company have a culture of over-timing?
- Does an employee receive extra payment for additional hours?
- How often can it happen?
- Are these additional hours mandatory to perform?
- Are all of the above spelled out in the contract?
If you don’t like the answer to any of the above questions, it’s probably a red flag of this company. Unless you love to work overtime.
In the worst case, the company has a culture of over-timing. It isn’t a one-time event. It’s something stable that happens every week. This way, you can easily add 20 more hours to the “required” week work hours.
Gray salary
The gray salary means that an employee’s salary consists of two parts: a legal one and an illegal one. The legal one is smaller to avoid paying big taxes. From the illegal part, nobody pays taxes at all.
The obvious thing — this approach is illegal. An employee that agrees to the gray salary breaks the law by avoiding paying taxes. By the way, this is what Al Capone was jailed for.
In the worst case, in addition, to avoiding taxes there could be other law problems depending on the country.
The companies that propose a gray salary break the law and set up the employees. This is a huge red flag!
Doesn’t exist in the public space
This one is easy to detect — 5 minutes of googling before the interview.
We live in 2022 — every company has a website. Most companies have social media accounts. You should be able to find them.
It is a red flag:
- if you can’t find any information about the company
- if their website is only one page updated last in 2014
- if they have empty accounts on social media
- if their CEO had some issues with the law
The companies that don’t appear in the public space could be fraudulent. In the best case, they just don’t care about their public image, which isn’t a smart approach in 2022. Media rules the world.
The public image of the company affects its income and development. So it’s worth checking this public image. You can find really curious things.
Always do your own research.
SCRUM / KANBAN fetish
If you work as a developer you know these words: Scrum and Kanban. These are the methodologies of project management. They were invented to simplify development. But in some companies, something goes wrong.
In a system with some measurable results, people start to work for these results. Even if the real ones suffer. That’s how bureaucracy works.
Scrum and Kanban are not bad approaches. If applied right, they increase team performance. But here is the issue — if applied wrong, they kill performance. For example:
- Meetings with 20 people to discuss a problem related to 3 of them
- Estimation meetings for the whole team
- Estimating tasks in terms of story points, then days of work, then days per person, etc.
- Position of Scrum Master whose only responsibility is to create more meetings
The above things could be OK. If everything works like a charm and everyone follows the rules. But we live in the real world, such things don’t happen.
So if you hear in the interview that the company strictly follows some methodology, you should ask more questions to clarify the situation.
Is their approach fits you? Don’t they turn approach in Mumbo Jumbo?
4 “won’t go” spheres
There are fields most developers would hate to work in.
- Weapon development
- Casino and gambling
- Sex and Porn industry
- Fraud projects
There are reasons for this. You can read them in detail in this article.
Final Thoughts
These were my 5 red flags of the terrible IT company. They might be subjective as they are based on my personal experience. Still, they are pretty valid in the modern world.
Feel free to share in the comments how you choose a company.
What red flags of terrible companies have you noticed during your career?
P.S. If you liked this thing, follow me and clap a couple of times. Good luck!
You can support me directly with your Medium subscription. It helps a lot!