Information asymmetry plus monopsony hiring power

There’s an unfortunate information asymmetry in hiring, where interviewees are expected to reveal everything about themselves, submit to background checks, have references, etc., and there’s no such expectation for companies. Most won’t even give you enough information to let you do a reasonable calculation of the value of stock options. This shouldn’t be surprising, since companies have monopsony power in the labor market.

Something that’s a bit strange, if not exactly unsurprising, is how employees willingly go along with this. The last time I looked for work, I tried to get the information I could about companies and then took a job at BigCo. Immediately after taking the job, two people I talked to at BigCo told me that they were surprised I took the job after talking to them, implying that they advised me not to take the job.

One person said that the company had great opportunities but said that there was a kind of a tax for working at the company. After pushing on this for fifteen minutes, I got the guy to be more specific and he disclosed that the shell people used at the company was overly verbose and he gave me some terms I could Google to find some example stackoverflow answers that illustrate the verbosity. The other person I talked to had an even weaker anti-recommendation than “the shell used here is verbose”.

After joining, I found the company to be the most strangely dysfunctional place I’d ever worked and both of the people who’d sort of but not really advised me to not take the job openly admitted that it was the same for them. The team I was on had a lot of unhappy people and turned over roughly half the team in a year (many people were on visas that prevented them from leaving without resetting their visa clock, which limited the turnover). Some of these people would strongly recommend the team and the company when they interviewed people. I asked why they’d recommend the team to other people when they hated it so much, and I got answers like “that’s what you’re supposed to do”.

At the same time I took that hilariously dysfunctional job, my partner took a job at UnicornCo. We know a lot of folks at UnicornCo and my partner talked to them about the potential job and didn’t hear anything negative before taking the job. Immediately after taking the job, we found out through friends of ours that my partner’s manager was legendarily bad and that the team she was joining was a mess as a result.

Many years previously, I interviewed at ChipCo, which was notorious for its strict stack ranking system and the resultant backstabbing. When I asked the standard “what’s the worst thing about working here?” question, I always got some inane thing that wouldn’t affect my decision. When I followed up with “what do you think of the ranking and rating system?” I almost always got an answer like “It’s the worst! It discourages teamwork and encourages backstabbing and you can’t trust most people as a result”. For the most part, people would only tell me about bad things if I already knew about the and revealed that I already knew about them. Once that happened, people were willing to tell me about other bad things that I didn’t know about, but I had to show that I was in the club before I’d hear about any of it.

I’m not sure what to make of this. If I look at the system as whole, I don’t think I can really make any difference. I’m personally quite candid about both the pros and cons when people ask me, but this means that I don’t get assigned to interview when I’m unhappy because most hiring managers don’t want candidates to hear about the cons.

As a job seeker, I don’t have any answers either. I now know enough people that I probably know someone at any company I might take a job at, but even outside of an interview context, I find that most people aren’t reliable sources of information. And even if I know someone who I trust as a reliable source of information, it’s unlikely that they have information about my potential new manager unless the manager is so terrible that they have a reputation throughout the company.