The only thing I can think of (and this is purely speculative, though I’ve interviewed at one and enjoyed the experience; didn’t move forward due to relocation concerns) is a quant trading firm.

Pardon the apparently naive question: are those places not filled with the most horrible vultures on the planet? That is what I would think but it seems like I am horribly wrong.

Could you elaborate some more, please?

I’ve never worked at one, but I interviewed at HRT. The interviewers were all quite kind, and more importantly to me, they asked difficult questions relevant to the role. Specifically, the role was for DBs, and the questions (beyond “can you do some basic coding”) were all low-level RDBMS or Linux. I hate Leetcode, doubly so when I will never, ever be using those skills on the job.

Given that those places are also doing stuff like writing their own network stack to reduce latency, I get the impression that they know their shit.

    > are those places not filled with the most horrible vultures on the planet?

Why do you think this?

On the contrary, I believe this is a misinformation widely spread by non-technical people about their grit. They actually do some really interesting(definition may differ from yours) work and paces are very sane.

However, given their pay and other contractual limitations, it can be very attractive and fiercely competitive to land a job unless you are really good. Hence the the fake “vultures” rumor to gate keep.

P.S. Worked at one briefly and figured that I will become unemployable in regular market soon if I ever plan to leave… and not work in this industry anymore.

Why would you be unemployable?

I found it in a corner of my $MEGACORP, but TBF, my corner is a former startup that was acquired and retained a lot of the brains.

It can only exist in high margin companies. The trick is to find business environments with some 'slack' in the funding, because that slack tends to propagate. I have made a career out of finding environments with high slack and avoiding environments with low slack.

By slack do you mean high margin or high revenue per employee or something similar? Or a large war chest/lots of runway?

Definitely, large war chest and lots of runway always helps. Also high margin may be good or bad but high revenue per employee(i.e. consulting firms in government, defense, finance, energy etc. sectors) are the most human friendly places to work at.

Do you have any actual script, as in, exact questions to ask during interview, so that executives and/or techies would answer clearly whether their company has financial slack?

Revenue or profits per employee is a good start.

Just curious… How do you find out there is slack before actually getting the job?

One hint might be found in yearly financial reports. It depends a bit on the country if you can access those reports from non-publicly traded companies. Are they debt-heavy, or do they have enough free cash flow? What if all customers disappear the next day, can the business continue for an extended period of time?

Is that indicator of slack though?

relevant:

Slack, by Tom DeMarco https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...