> A simple question to ask an employer during an interview is whether the company is profitable or not. If so, for how long?
This is great advice.
For instance, I was once in an interview where they were grilling me. I was reluctant to do the interview in the first place, because they'd gone bankrupt TWICE in the past five years.
At the end of the interview, it seemed fairly clear that my odds of getting the job were about 50/50. The interviewers were smart and they were asking hard questions.
But when I asked them to comment on their two recent bankruptcies, it changed the mood entirely. At that point, the entire "vibe" of the interview shifted. It became CLEAR that they'd been losing employees at a furious pace, because of their financial struggles.
Once we talked about "the elephant in the room," the entire interview tone changed, and they made me an offer in less than twelve hours.
My "hunch" is that they'd been grilling interviewees (because they were smart folks) but had been scaring interviewees off because they were in such terrible financial shape.
Basically, potential hires were ghosting them because of their financial problems, while they were simultaneously discussing technical issues when the real issue was financial.
I accepted the offer, and the company is still around. I had a similar interview experience at FTD in San Diego (the florist), and they are kaput:
I'm in a VC-owned business with a 50% profit ebitda. But a common trick is to just load it with debt. The VC firm pays out all profits as dividends, all investments into restructuring, M&A and new technology is paid for by high-interest loans from the shareholder. What's left is a company that barely cashflows as all profit goes towards paying interest to the VC firm.
The appointed management team has to operate within that scope (i.e. no real budget to work with, despite the 50% interest), and they squeeze a bit more each year, meaning it's an uphill battle each year to get a raise or promotion. On top of that it's a cashcow in an otherwise dying and slowly shrinking business sector.
In other words a terrible place for general salary growth.
So I'd add two points to your list which is to: look for (1) profitable companies, (2) in expanding markets, (3) that aren't owned by VC.
Startups have their own set of rules where (3) doesn't really apply as much.
You stated that there aren't many profitable lifestyle companies. And the insinuation put forth is that they are very rare to the point of almost nonexistent.
This comes off as rather reductionist and absolute to me; tech is a massive industry, do you know every sector within and adjacent to tech to have reached this conclusion?
No. But I do know statistics. The largest employees in tech are the public companies that we have all heard of. The next largest segment are VC funded companies with the smallest segment by far being the “lifestyle companies”.
Do an exercise, go to any job board and put in filters to match the types of jobs you are qualified for. How many of those do you think are going to be profitable, private, lifestyle companies?
I would put money on all of big tech and all public companies combined not employing more than 30% of professional programmers. At least in the US only 15% work at a large company (500+).
There's still a question of what you consider profitable.
A company may make more in revenue than strictly expenses but stock-based compensation is often not considered an expense so if you add those into the expense side it could change profitability.
> We provide non-GAAP free cash flow because it is a liquidity measure that provides useful information to management and investors about the amount of cash generated by the business that can be used for strategic opportunities, including investing in our business and acquisitions, and to strengthen our balance sheet.
Layoffs in big tech are mostly to place workers in their place and shake the market, they've definitely been able to drive down salaries these past two years.
