"Others said they were actively looking for their next jobs — a task made more difficult because of the taint of failure that potential employers sometimes associate with anyone at the struggling company."
For those with experience hiring, do you find this to be generally true? Would it really count as a black mark to have worked at a "failing" or "struggling" company, independent of your own experience/skills/accomplishments or would it really depend on the situation/candidate? I realize this isn't a black/white question and is likely more of a gray area.
A good hiring manager is trying earnestly to see how the candidate's skills fit into the job req, and how the personality fits into the team.
The name of the company you worked for last is not really that important. There are talented folks on the market right out of school, from failed startups, and leaving boring or stagnant companies.
I do suppose that experience at some companies, like AWS or Google, is a real bonus.
But you need to be careful of this too. Experience at Google doesn't mean the engineer learned all the best practices and isn't a jerk.
While that isn't true in my hiring experience as well, it's very true that, in general, people will trip over themselves for a chance to anonymously pass negative "honest" judgement on others. Especially if the person passing judgement has a position of prestige or power, i.e. it's a hiring manager in a company that just IPO'd.
Another way of saying this is that any potentially negative detail on a resume will be invariably perceived as negative by someone. Not because it's right but because people are people.
"One Yahoo employee who was interviewed said she was praying to be laid off so she could collect a severance payment and move on with her life."
Would you think this particular employee would be valuable? I think many of the best employees have already left. Good employees will easily find new jobs and won't need the severance payment, I would think.
I think in general Yahoo employees will be less attractive for employers now, compared to perhaps half a year ago.
people have a lot of reasons for staying with a company beyond just not being a 10x developer or a super rockstar ninja or whatever assumptions.
Maybe they have a family or a new house, or both. Maybe they are excellent developers but lack political awareness or marketing skills. Maybe they have more freedom with a certain task than likely elsewhere. Maybe they feel a lot of loyalty.
Its a very unreliable inference to assume they are just somehow less than ideal canidates because they choose to continue with what appears to be a failing company from the outside. Not everyone cares about absolutely maximizing long term career prospects at all stages of their life. That dosent make them bad employees.
You're of course correct, but the point was that the probability distribution is shifted. It's a blunt probabilistic instrument, but it's extremely common in hiring to use such instruments.
I've hired some great former Yahooligans (or whatever they used to call themselves before the grey malaise descended), especially analytics-focused developers. Granted, they all left Yahoo before things got really awful, but just because a company is failing doesn't mean its employees are failures. In fact, I've learned more from failed companies than successful ones; all successful companies are in their key metrics alike, but every failed company fails in its own edifying way.
It's deliberate -- although I don't know about being "profound". :-)
In other words, while I take prior places of employment as signal (just as others do), I tend to discount it heavily. I know smart people working at not-great places, as well as people I would never hire working at some very well-respected companies.
In the end, I'm hiring the person now, not their history.
It depends. If they joined in the last three years, then no. If they have been there for seven or eight years, I have to wonder a bit why they didn't leave yet. If they've been there for ten or more years, I'd have some serious doubts, because all the great people I know who used to work there all left about six to eight years ago and said that only the unemployable stayed behind.
That is of course not entirely true -- I have very talented friends who still work there. But I would be more cautious for sure.
For software engineers? Good taste is really the only skill a software developer needs, and working at a dead-end company like Yahoo reveals a lack of taste. Working at Yahoo would certainly look like a negative to me, more or less depending on the hire date.
"Others said they were actively looking for their next jobs — a task made more difficult because of the taint of failure that potential employers sometimes associate with anyone at the struggling company."
For those with experience hiring, do you find this to be generally true? Would it really count as a black mark to have worked at a "failing" or "struggling" company, independent of your own experience/skills/accomplishments or would it really depend on the situation/candidate? I realize this isn't a black/white question and is likely more of a gray area.