saddist0

I am a long time lurker in the community and joining a position after 7 years in a FAANG+ role.

I took multiple positions from Sr. SE to Head of Engineering in different startups but the due diligence is quite lax and people don't care much about your degree in early stage startups.

I wanted to hear from HR or people who know about the background checks.

- Does it matter a lot in bigger companies who use fancy background verification tools?

- Just in case it comes negative do the HR recheck with candidates or what is the process to not get it negative at the first place, etc?

# Background

Majority of us try to optimise for compensation in the initial years of the professional experience. I am lucky debt-free and no longer have that as the primary motivation.

# Problem

I hate the culture inside Meta right now, where majority of the colleges don't know much and are not inspirational. While I love my compensation, I was looking out for companies which can have better people (in average).

Do you have any suggestion on how to filter out such roles or companies? Primary with least number of colleagues who are just there for free money and highest number of inspirational ones.

# Current approach

I am looking Series A startups, and going through the team and few last hires (to know how desperate are they, have they reduced hiring bar, etc). But this has been quite slow and unfruitful.

Problem: How to find interesting products/solutions/tools to build?

Things tried:

* Followed HN, Indiehackers, etc., to keep me up-to-date and to look for some ideas

* Browsed profiles and things people are doing on YC co-founder matching.

* Typical GitHub scan on the domains I love to work.

Why didn't you get one yet?

* Cold-start issue, especially after being out of touch with the dev

* Majority of the ideas already exist, and just another alternative didn't excite me.

My background:

* Got burnt out, quitted the job, completed a few months vacation (attempting to do this full time)

* Used to be 100% hands-on person, top of the class, fanciest job, etc.

Motivation:

* Want to revive my love for building new things again.

* Quite impressed with the intersection of build-in public and open-core models.