So, What’s It Like To Work There?

How do you find out? Positive reviews are everywhere, but what about the negative ones?!

Photo by Yan Krukov from Pexels

Leading on from a previous diatribe where I presented the case that ‘exit interviews’ are an utter waste of time, for a number of reasons, let’s consider today how you (the departing progressive engineer) can give valuable feedback to your comrades whilst all the time skirting around the dreadful positive whitewash that company job sites and recruiters plaster all over bad situations.

I’d really like to know if a company was a seriously dreadful place to work — the coffee tasted like gravel, the whole managerial staff were ‘agile certified’ or just that the CEO was a raving lunatic who ran around in the office in his pants shouting about cryptocurrency. Wouldn’t you?

Let’s consider the various ways that a well meaning yet wounded progressive engineer can go about sharing their negative experiences (as sharing positive experiences is so laughably easy these days people actually pay you to do it).

Through this, my fellow engineer, you will find enlightenment — or at least find out where all the negative reviews go to hide and why they do so.

A Recruitment Perspective

I’ve given negative feedback to recruiters, and continue to do so, when they approach me about going back to certain companies that I’ve suffered with in the past.

Unfortunately, I do feel it goes in one ear and out of the other as I cannot envisage a recruiter using this knowledge for anything useful or constructive. They’re certainly not going to pass on my bad experience to a future candidate, after all, as it could cost them a placement and a bonus.

In the cold light of a cynical day¹, recruiters are a slippery sloped funnel for fresh meat being ingested into the corporate mill before subsequent its pulping and mincing and really have very little to do with you once you’re employed and their own substantial bonus is banked.

In point of fact I’ve never once been contacted by a recruiter after taking a permanent position to see how things are going, but have frequently been (and taken out repeatedly for lunch²) by them when working as a contractor.