Interviews are 2-way streets. I had a bad feeling about my team and the culture during the interview, but i chose to ignore it. I joined Intel a year back, and came from Texas, so took this as an opportunity to work in a big tech company. During the interview, i felt like I won't be a good fit, but thought I was being too picky, and I was getting paid decent based on my field and YOE(2 yrs), so decided to take it. And how I regrett it. The culture is slow, gridlocked and just rotten inside. Although my manager isn't too bad, I don't think he has any particular work for me. He keeps giving me random, non-urgent, no visibility projects which are not even from the field I majored in. Its just been a year with Intel, but it felt like it went so so so slow! I am in a dull state of no productivity and that tired me out and is very demotivating. I would like to avoid making this mistake again. There is no point working in a slow bloated company like this. How can I pick the right team and manager the next time?
One of the ways is to ask the potential manager what is important to them in a team. You then can assess level of energy/enthusiasm of the manager. Also whether their focus is on vision, visibility, product, process, people or something else. Some of those are red flags.
My answer is framed based on what I know bad managers to be. A bad manager opens the team and individuals up to subjective measures of success. A bad manager has no clue whether there are flight risks on the team, whether high performers are dangerously bored/underutilized, whether the team is at risk in anyway (morale, attrition, burnout). A bad manager is disengaged: unresponsive, absentee, unaware, disinterested. A bad manager doesn’t ask about your personal career goals. Doesn’t advocate on your behalf when it comes to the things that matter to you (bad manager probably is a poor advocate to begin with). A bad manager doesn’t connect his/her success with individuals on the team. Has his/her goals in mind, either from ambition or ignorance. Better to have no manager than a bad manager...
A good manager is the opposite of what you find at Intel: someone who works with you for mutual benefit. At Intel, unless you decide to be a politically reliable crony, you are just human chattel to be exploited and abused.
- Obviously, ask what’s in the pipeline and what kind of opportunities you’ll have. - A good manager is a manger who is fanned high... That could be hard to judge. He has to be a bad ass winner. If you try hard you can discern it. Anybody else will use you as a scapegoat for his or her failure and incompetence. P.S. Use the shitty slow projects as an opportunity to leetcode in between and gtfo. There’s no future at intel.
Not indian.
Look outside of intel