Saw this posted on another site...
Thought it was interesting... And from what I've seen over the years, pretty accurate...
"Warning signs of a bad employer:
1) Family business, the owner is the CEO. Lots of opportunity for arbitrary craziness plus he'll hate spending money on anything.
2) Family members in the same company. You end up with unfireable people who confide in each other, a sort of company within the company.
3) Extreme long term technical employees. It's their baby, you will have to form anything you do to their model of the world. Usually behind the times in practice, always a PITA.
4) Recently fired/layed off/quit senior technical employees. Guess who has to clean up the mess."
Of course there are exceptions to numbers 1 to 3, but these seem like pretty reasonable general rules.
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PITA?
Aren't #3 and #4 generally opposites?
They could be, but probably not in every case. I would say that not every bad employer that follows those patterns exhibits all four. Any one of the four could be cause for concern.
Anyway, if the company was up until recently exhibiting #3 and suddenly gets rid of or loses a long time senior technical person then #4 would quite likely come into play. In some cases the situation could be exacerbated by in the past there having been more than one long time senior technical people and one leaves... it could be really tough for anyone to come in and fill that gap and figure out how to work with the remaining technical people... you might get things like "well so-and-so used to be okay with that" or "so-and-so used to do it like...".