Comment by throwanem
5 days ago
Unless desperate, why would I have accepted an offer or taken a contract if all of those didn't already seem in line? Why would you have?
The thing is, people can lie about all of those, but whatever social problems exist in the environment will invariably be evident in the code.
What's the old saw about how if you have four teams working on a compiler, you'll get a four-pass compiler? Conway's law [1], that's the one. That one works in both directions. When you're reading code that seems like it would be 0.1x as complicated if any of the people involved in writing it ever spoke to one another, the wise engineer new to this environment begins asking, why do these people never speak to one another? But not too loud!
......and the tech stack is usually obvious in the job posting.
If it's that vitally important to you to only work at jobs with tech stacks that will "advance your career" beyond that job, why would you even apply to a job that doesn't show one you consider worthy?
Why indeed? Some of my very first quotably direct words in this thread were "I don't care about your stack:" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44253569
I made an exception for one specific technology that in my experience draws a particularly intolerable crowd, while offering peculiarly poor pay to make up for the unusual degree of tolerance for abuse that is required to navigate the social dysfunctions such people invariably create and foster. What gets so up your nose about that, anyway?