This. I'm now working at a small- to mid-sized (~80 people) local B2B company. Pay is fine, they offer 100% WFH if you want, but they also have nice offices, they make good and stable revenue with reasonable growth targets, the actual work is somewhere between interesting and mind-numbingly stupid (e.g. integrating with poorly documented enterprise software - can be fun, but can also be aggravating), people are mostly happy.

There is a focus on delivering for clients rather than following processes.

I have about an hour of required meetings a week, 15-30 minutes technical meetings where people bring up any tech roadblocks or things where they need help, and a 20-45 minute sprint planning meeting. There's one monthly "show cool stuff" meeting for the whole company where everybody can voluntarily show something interesting they made. The rest of the time, I'm writing code, documentation, helping coworkers, talking to clients, stuff like that.

There is very high trust, e.g. people make honest effort estimates and there's no punishment or bad feedback if they're missed. There's a wide variety of skills because it's hard to attract top performers. This makes it easy to get hired (they immediately invited me for an interview after I sent them my CV, and made an offer after talking to me for 30 minutes), and it also means there's a culture of helping people and being patient and understanding when people are making an honest effort, but don't quite get things on the first try.

I'm working eight hours a day, five days a week, and when I'm done with work for the day, I don't think about it until the next day. It's nice.

This has been my life for the last 10 years and I know who my children really are. They're evil and I love it.

If you let that (evil) go too far you'll regret it.

That place sounds great. I complain about more than an hour of meetings a day and am told that is unrealistic. This is a small company with under 30 people. Half of them seem to go to meetings all day long.

If your job is to build consensus for a plan, to collect feedback before committing to a major decision or to communicate progress and agree next steps on anything, meetings are work.

Meetings are work.

I can’t say this enough - not all work can be done on your own in an editor or IDE.

And no, it’s often not just busywork. It depends on the domain you’re in and what level of experience your colleagues have.

If you work in anything touching public sector, you’re going to need a lot more meetings to get alignment on even small decisions than if you work on a trading floor. It’s the nature of the beast and how “compliance” is interpreted by different cultures.

Meetings are work.

Hi InsideOutSanta,

This sounds like a place I'd enjoy working at.

Email is HN username at gmail.

Thanks

This is a great job ad - are they hiring?

Yes, but there's a 99.9% chance they can't hire you, because you live in the wrong country :-)

What I would do is look at local governments, at local municipalities. They often have public calls for bids for software projects, like digitizing some forms or processes. Stuff that's too small for big corporations to care about. Look at the companies that apply for these projects. They're often small, local, stable, and starved for good software engineers.

I worked on a small company similar to what you just described now. We were a group of 15 people inside a Microsoft license seller in South America. But our job was actually related to get those public bids for web systems to help their government processes. If I wasn't being paid close to minimum wage it'd be the best job. The deadlines were almost non existent, the people were nice, even our clients inside the government were very cool to chat with. The company went bankrupt because some scandals and it had to change to something else so I went to another place. But it's a really cool concept that also can be very profitable. 3 medium size projects of that type and I could retire in a few years.

A reasonable interview process is huge - avoid the Leetcode charade.

Leetcode is a form of tribal filtering without the legal implications impact due to pre existing bias

Ymmv. Small companys can change fast culturally and are still figuring out their management layers. Maybe there are some filtering interview questions but this company profile (like any comoany profile) is not a panacea.

This is exactly the company we've built. As a bonus we have pretty interesting technical problems. I think a big reason our company is like this is because the almost the entire leadership team are in their 40's and have young kids. We care a lot about growth of the company but we've removed all the BS of operating a company so that we can fit it into our lives.

> pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer.

Oh, well said there. Worked consulting for 13 years, and this was the main source of stress. You feel like it's your fault—and are sometimes treated by management like it's your fault—because you're on salary and they have nothing for you to work on. Emphasis on 'they'. That feeling of being on the chopping block, unsure of whether you'll be laid off or not, recurred independently about 3-6 times a year.

Wow, 3-6 times a year? At my firm I've been on the same project for almost a year and a half, and the previous project was over a year. I did have about 6 weeks of downtime in between them though, and if they were doing layoffs then maybe they would have given me the axe. I did knock out a cloud certification during that downtime though, which was beneficial to them for keeping their partnerships.

Did your firm just never get any extensions to projects? My firm tries pretty hard to get those any chance they get. Or were they all like due diligences or something?

The longest I ever worked on a contract was 2 years, the shortest was probably 2 hours. Most projects were 1-3 months. At the company I'm thinking of, they kept a public list of people who were "on the bench", which meant they'd finished a contract, and the company didn't have another one for them yet. In sports, being on the bench sort of implies that you can't cut it, but 99% of the time that's not how it was.

I agree professional services can stress you out. Being billable means you’re on multiple projects at some points if you’re good and if you’re not you’re benched.

I need to figure out if I go back to professional services again as it can be a strain and I’m late stage career principal/ enterprise architect that joining a company to work on “cool projects to put on your cv” is not a selling point any longer

I think about it sometimes too. There were pluses and minuses. The money was actually quite good, and there is a certain luxury in being able to say "this ain't my product, I'm just a hired gun, I'll be gone in a couple months and y'all will have to deal with your dumb decisions" rather than having a feeling of ownership that extends beyond the quality of your own work. In other words, doing what you're told as best you can, instead of trying to fruitlessly to fight against the structure and inertia of a dysfunctional company.

My longest employment stint was at such a company and it was a very good experience for me. That said, even though I worked at such a company for a while, I don't have a very good idea how I would go about identifying other such companies with open roles. Any suggestions on how to do that?

I wonder if Crunchbase would be useful here?

Responded to another thread but Pitchbook or Crunchbase can both be helpful.

Try: https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage...

Isn’t the Series D or E when a painful restructure or layoffs or pivot occurs or is that a later round?

For identifying companies by size/funding/vertical sure. Been a while since I used it (thank god I got out of sales) but they almost definitely track headcount growth if not actual openings. Trouble is you probably won’t find it in the free version

VC firms often have recruiters that are familiar with the stage and quality of their portfolio amd can provide warm introductions. Last go round I gave them my criteria (no moonshots, solid revenue, post series A, no crypto) and had several quickly lined up.

I would second the mid-size B2B option here. I found professional services a bit stressful for what the OP is saying.

But I also think it’s really personal. Since turning 40 I tried: moving into management at a ~100 dev company; IC at a big tech firm (first time I’d worked somewhere really big as a dev); and now I’m back to running tech side of things at a startup.

I don’t think I could have known in advance which of those was going to work for me. There were a lot of positives to the first two, even though I ultimately left. Turns out I actually do prefer a) small places and b) a mix of management and IC work. But I’m absolutely sure that’s not true for everyone.

OP might feel like they want something very different from running their own startup – I also felt pretty burnt out on that after 7 years of my own – but once they’ve had some time they might remember why they went that way in the first place!

"C/D+ stage 100-500" where could I find a list of such companies?

Pitchbook if you have access/a friend, otherwise crunchbase.

I’m on mobile but try this: https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage...

wasn't going to reply but you called out Accenture.

I work at the Government Contracting arm of Accenture called Accenture Federal and it is by far the best place I've ever worked ( I worked in submarines for a decade so probably nowhere to go but up from there). It ranks highly in those marketing pieces "best places to work" if you're into that sort of thing.

anyway, I highly recommend Accenture Federal. Great projects, benefits, and WLB

I work for Accenture too. It's like any giganto-corp, there are parts of the organization that are great and parts that are not so great. I was lucky to be hired into one of the very good areas. I've worked for a bunch of other Fortune 500s and it's the same story. I think at that scale it's basically impossible to have a uniform culture.

That's true there is nowhere to go but up if you're in a submarine!

Some passengers from the oceangate submersible Titan might have a different opinion.

This. 1000% this. I'm 57 and still kicking around the industry deliberately choosing companies like the ones described.

It's also important to note that I have a small network of people also working for companies like this who have helped me and sometimes have outright hired me.

I work for a place very similar to what you described. Its a really good gig

The question I always run into for your first point - how do you find these companies? If I want to move into a brand new business vertical, by definition I don't know any of the players or know where to look for that - for lack of a better word - audience.

Imagine that you are a customer of that vertical and search accordingly.

> and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged

> under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast

How do you reconcile these 2 statements? Maybe there's something else you mean by work/life balance?

Yeah fair question and one I thought would come up. Tl;dr: those are orthogonal concerns - work/life balance doesn't mean the job is easy, it means it's not toxic and doesn't kill all your time. But more fully, what I mean is:

A healthy (what I meant by "good") work/life balance means you work, and you have a life. You have mostly normal hours excepting maybe an occasional crunch or need to travel to a client; you can go to the doctor if you need to; nobody complains if you have to take a few minutes' break to mediate a fight between your kids during the school holidays; PTO is taken by most people and isn't a big deal - that sort of thing.

The second statement is about what the work side is like. There are jobs where you show up, punch a clock, maybe do a code review or make some pointless changes to a CRUD app, but mostly sit around collecting a paycheck. At least for me, that's soul destroying: feeling like you're doing nothing of value, not even contributing to whatever bullshit purpose statement your employer has invented. Then there are jobs where you are flogged to within an inch of your life, abused daily, have your priorities shifted without any input, have to deal with multiple conflicting managers directing what you do, are subject to politics, maybe pay comes late... Awful.

I'm describing a middle way where you are very obviously aware that you're part of a team facing real challenges, your work has noticeable impact, there's effective competition and sometimes they win and everyone feels it. Your days go by quickly, meaningful stuff gets done (at least, within the context of the company if not solving world hunger), the triumphs take effort and the defeats hurt. The problems you're solving are meaty, you're under reasonable but fairly continuous expectation to deliver high quality work and other people and teams are relying on you to do that.

Yeah I've been working at a smaller consulting firm for the past three years and doing fine. Also helped me update my skills, especially cloud skills as all my previous jobs were onprem.

I've been mostly getting away with just over 40 hour weeks, although if I was on any other client at the company I'd be expected to bill 45 hours. PTO is very flexible as long as I'm meeting my utilization for the year (working 85% of potential hours) and can get approval from the client (which for me hasn't been an issue). Even the year where I was a bit under my utilization due to no fault of my own (they didn't have me staffed on a client for six weeks so I wasn't billing anything and then when they finally did at first I could only bill 10-20 hours a week) it didn't stop them promoting me that year and giving me a pretty decent bonus.

Also the only job I've ever had where I can expect an annual bonus worth a damn. I had one for one other job briefly but it was small and they took all bonuses away after two years to save money.

They do encourage working extra hours on internal initiatives and things like that, but I mostly haven't and it hasn't hurt much (maybe I get a slightly somewhat lower bonus and I'm getting promoted a bit slower).

While there's a lot of younger people at the firm, there's several older engineers here too, including a few guys in their 50s.

I'm also like 99% WFH. I go into the office every once in a while for quarterly parties or for some important in-person event, but otherwise I'm fully WFH. Which has been especially important this year as I've been having some issues with my legs and have had to have several medical procedures on them and work on the couch a lot to keep them elevated.

I don't think I could work for one of the Big 4, though, those sound completely exhausting. I hear 60+ hour weeks is often the minumum expectation there. I've got a life outside of work, including games I'm coding in my spare time, I don't need that shit.

How much unbilled time do you have? If you're expected to bill 40 hours/week, right of the top that means you have a more than 40 hour work week because by definition you can't be going to the bathroom or eating lunch. Then if you ever have an unbilled meeting or something, that adds even more.

Where I am now we're not expected to bill quite as much for this reason. Although I did once work somewhere where there was a requirement for 2250 hours/year billed. Which doesn't seem *to* bad until you take PTO into account and the aforementioned bio breaks.

I always report more than 40 hours a week for my internal company tracking (because there's usually a couple of internal firm meetings during the week), but it's never usually more than 45 hours. We've been pretty meeting-lite lately so I'm usually just reporting 42 hour weeks lately.

That being said, I don't worry about tracking bathroom breaks, or the occasional mental break here and there. My client is happy, I'm getting done what they're wanting to get done when they're wanting it to be done, I just bill 8 hours for the day and it's not a big deal (obviously it isn't, they've been willing to pay for me for almost three years at this point on two different projects and I get glowing reviews whenever I request feedback from them to pass along to my boss).

I work 8:30 to 5:30 so that includes an extra hour for lunch, by the way, so that's not counted, no. But I'm at home, so it doesn't feel like work anyway, just an hour to relax, have a sandwich, let the dogs out, and maybe throw a recipe in the slow cooker for dinner.

I'm actually in the middle of a 3.5 week break because I had so much built up time at the end of the year. I knew my client does a two week furlough for consultants at the end of the year so I was already planning for that, and also was planning a week for a wedding trip for a wedding ceremony/reception that had to be cancelled because a recent hurricane pretty much destroyed the town it was going to be held in. And I took a week off for vacation earlier this year.

Got it, that makes sense. And yeah, one place I worked tracked time in 30 min increments for instance and stuff like bathroom breaks were just lost in the noise of that. Current place is at the minute level, so stuff like that doesn't get tracked as billed time.

Consulting definitely is a good way to exercise a bunch of different skills and languages. I'll say though that I feel like my resume is toxic for being one though. Bums me out

Like people see consulting on there and assume you're not skilled because they had some bad experiences with consultants?

At least in my case, the quality of my work as a consultant is no worse than any work I've done in industry (and almost certainly better, as I got exposed to more modern practices and worked with a wider variety of people), and I had industry jobs for like 16 years before this job.

My client also requires code reviews with engineers that work for the company internally (technically just other people on the team, but there's a couple internal people on the team that usually do the reviewing), so pretty much everything I write gets internal approval before it gets merged into the codebase.

If I got questioned about that in the interview, I could just tell them that.

Also because my firm is smaller they might not realize it's a consulting firm to begin with just from the name on the resume. It isn't something easily recognizable like Deloitte or Accenture.

This does sometime become a red flag for some companies. Deserved or not, some people will view people with a lot of consulting experience with suspicion if they're a product company. The reasoning is that consulting groups tend to not have skin in the game. They can come in, write a bunch of crap, and then walk away leaving the mess for some future person to deal with. Thus the concern is that the ex-consultant will not have developed good habits in terms of maintainability of code, dealing with production issues, etc.

It's definitely true for some people I've met, but it's definitely *not* true for others I've met. But if you're interviewing, how does the potential employer know which you are?

I guess so? I'm on about 12 years experience and I've had 2 interviews where they explicitly mentioned that they want people who worked for a product company. I've started tinkering with hiding the fact I'm a consultant and just listing the projects I've done (which I'm proud of) as companies but of course that would fall apart if they did any calling. All clients I've been on have loved me and would gladly give me a good reference but they couldn't claim I was employed there. lol.

I really appreciate my consulting experience just from the sheer diversity of cloud environments and languages I've had to deal with but who knows!

How do you find these places if you're not an American?

Can confirm. At 40 I left the large corporate engineering world for a smaller company. Haven’t regretted it. Better quality in terms of pay, time off, managers, leadership, communication, and work relationships. The smaller teams and clear communication that a smaller company can provide improves the overall quality of the job.