Comment by ctkhn

I think most jobs you can tell from a combination of the recruiting process and then onboarding and your first week. I have felt the "I hope this isn't how it is every day" that the author mentions at a few of my jobs and they've all been stinkers.

Recruiting gives me an idea of how much the company generally cares about their processes. I like when am I given a timeline of the process and steps and now when I get a random call from the recruiter in the middle of a meeting at my current job because the new co didn't ask when I'm free.

Onboarding tells me how much the team is haphazardly shipping vs actually owning their product. The teams that have sucked are the ones where the onboarding doc is heavily out of date (like all covering a now-unused access request system) or I can't even get help from the team within my first week to have someone send me access requests to copy for the things that are missing. The good teams are where my manager already provisioned my access before I joined and immediately addresses any misses when I flag them. Or if they have good enough docs for me to quickly handle it myself.

Career development is another one that takes a little longer to suss out, but if I can have a good first-week chat with my manager where they will explain what my baseline performance expectations are and what I need to do to overachieve and get on promotion/raise track, that's a good flag. The teams I haven't been able to get that early from are the ones where manager usually doesn't care not only about your career but also about app maintainability or anything past their next meeting with their own manager.