Comment by crowcroft

and sometimes before starting ... at two weeks' out, they'd had to change the salary offer (down) because they had screwed up the salary calculation, expressed surprise I'd said I planned to use the unlimited vacation policy to take a fixed four weeks a year (they felt it was a lot), changed the offer from employee to contractor, referred me to their accountant for what was really the simplest of accounting queries, sent me an equity calculator with an assumption of a $10bn sale price, and some other weird stuff. Really should have known better, and only lasted a few months -- my old company reached out to check I was happy in the new role, and had me back within a fortnight of checking in.

A good smell test for a job that isn't right for you is whether you ask yourself if it is the right job early on, or if you even have thoughts of quitting in the first year/month/week, apart from being overwhelmed by all the new faces.

The only "bad" job that I had was with a very good company (wonderful people, great benefits, just the code absolutely sucked), so that was making the decision very hard to quit. In larger corporations, one might be able to engineer moving departments if that helps.

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