Don’t work for a gaming company, or you’ll be spending long nights trying to meet deadlines that they’ll never ever let slide
Mostly agreed. The one exception being people who really have a unique skill and passion for game development - it's just what they do best. There are a ton of people with very modest ability and achievements who put themselves in this category unfortunately, and end up paying a heavy price because of this (e.g., they start an Indie company and spin their wheels for 20 years, or join a game company and just fade into the background, while losing out on the benefits of more supportive industries).
Never ever work for large electronic manufacturers like cellphone companies for example, or else you’ll be a mundane software validation test engineer.
It depends - a lot of these companies need system software specialists, and if they have their own SoC, they will need everything from kernel engineers to compiler engineers, to performance engineers working across the hardware and software teams, to application engineers writing some pretty close to the metal performant code - much of it pretty advanced and interesting.
Never ever work in an R&D department, because that will be the first department that they will lay off during hard times.
In my experience, during hard times, the focus moves to R&D for a strategy on what to do when the economy moves out of the current cycle. You want to be the company that starts off with an edge, not the one that is offering years old tech.
One of the important things to do is look at the cash reserves relative to the annual expenditure for the company. This gives you an idea on how well equipped they are to weather the storm. I went though the 2008-2010 cycle in a well prepared company - resources went into R&D, not out of it.
Never ever work for a start up company, because most of them will fail within the first year or two. The ones that don’t will dangle stock options in front of you instead of a good salary, work you to death, and when the time comes that you can exercise your options they’ll either be worthless or the company won’t let you exercise them.
These are all very valid concerns and certainly do happen on practice. I don't think that there is a one size fits all argument here though - really, if you think that the startup is founded on a brilliant idea, and that it appears to have all the right people to execute it, you should go for it. If you're not equipped to make this determination, it's more than likely a bad bet.
Never ever work for a company that was acquired by a private equity firm. These companies do not care about their employees. It’s about making the numbers look good, so they can sell the company off in a few years. That will mean lots of layoffs prior to the sell off to make the numbers look even better. The equity firm will typically not hang onto a company for more than 7 years tops.
This reasoning is a bit naive. Laying off people prior to selling to make the numbers look good isn't going to get past the potential acquirer. The company culture of "caring" about the employees is set by those in upper management - being privately owned doesn't mean they care (I've definitely had this experience in the past), and neither does having anonymous stockholders. A good management team will have a healthy balance of keeping the right people and dropping the wrong people, while monitoring morale. This is part of the selling point for PE as well.
Start looking for a job immediately after any company is sold to another company. This will end badly for most employees making high salary’s or employees with the least seniority.
This doesn't make much sense. Clearly they will want to keep the senior employees who know the product best, and the junior employees who offer good value for money. In my experience the situation you don't want to be in, is when the company that acquires you already has an established department for your roles. E.g., do they really need another payroll accountant? Another head of human resources? etc.
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