How To Do Research

We walk through how to actually evaluate companies and teams, emphasizing that good information is hard to find and rarely lives in public reviews.

Here are the core points from the lesson:

• We stress that big companies aren’t monolithic—cultures vary widely across thousands of teams—so the most reliable way to assess a company or team is to tap into our network, where trusted people can share accurate, firsthand experiences.
• We highlight why building deep relationships in school and at work is invaluable: our network expands our access to real data over time, and meaningful connections (teammates, managers, peers) often shape our opportunities more than technical ability alone.
• We suggest complementary methods—reverse-interviewing during the hiring process, reading engineering blogs, following tech news, and checking curated communities—to gather signal, while warning that Glassdoor skews too positive and Blind skews too negative due to self-selection.
• We show that even venture capital, which allocates billions in tech, runs almost entirely on networks and backchannel references—underscoring that our own career decisions benefit from the same relationship-driven information flow.