Who knows, maybe if you joined you would have hated it too, or loved it ! The story you shared is likely shared by many other companies that went through hyper-growth
TLDR: Stuff is hard!
Some opportunities I missed but they didn't go anywhere: Docker, Qualcomm.
Consumer Devices is a general dud I think. Software and data is where it is at. I dunno?
Even in other posts here, people are like “whew I wouldnt want to work for a company where an unrelated recruiter and hiring manager did something nonstandard” as if it was a predictor of their team
Nowadays it may be easier somewhat to get some insight into inner workings, but in 2006 there was no Blind, Glassdoor, etc. Sometimes the positive signals outweigh the negative. In my case they did not.
They’re just people like everyone else, subject to the same psychological failings as anyone.
Giving people a lot of power over other people might just be a recipe for disaster.
Of course I’ve met some compelling leaders and I’ve seen them replaced with total fools so maybe there are people who are better at it than others. (Eric Schmidt springs to mind as an example of the former and Sundar whatever his name is an example of the latter) Maybe it’s just hard to tell the difference. Or maybe our selection process is flawed.
The question comes from a self-selecting population.
Everybody would improve something, and it can give you insight into actual day-to-day challenges.
If they say, “Nothing,” either it’s the one rare perfect workplace or they are too afraid or checked out to give a real answer.
Either way it’s informative.
(sort of like: "my one weakness is I work TOO hard!")
This reminds me of the joke where the economist sees the $100 bill on the ground and says if it were real, someone would have grabbed it already. It assumes that the market is perfectly efficient when it is not. There are tons of reasons why someone would work at one job when they would prefer another job:
Maybe the local job market is poor, but the worker can't move.
Maybe their spouse has a medical condition that requires really good health insurance, and moving to another job would lose that coverage.
Maybe the worker has been job-hopping too much and has to stay at this job for another year or whatever.
etc., etc.
This was Nvidia in 2006 and their stock is up about 200x since then.