Show HN: Key Values – Find engineering teams that share your values

People are strange.

I think they can mitigate this by making the companies pick a limited number of "most important values". That way they're incentivized to make sure they mention all the things they're actually valuing, and leave out things that they don't actively prioritize (so you may think you have a high quality codebase, but if it isn't in the top 3-4 things you'd mention to a candidate, it's not a value of yours necessarily)

Re: ambiguous "value tags", they're up for interpretation. I encourage you (and others) to read how different teams describe the same value and what it means to them. Also, there are several teams who didn't choose Creative + Innovative, Customer Comes First, and/or High Quality Codebase.

No company will "advertise" that they do not produce high quality, but we still learn something when high quality code isn't included in a team's top values. This is the beauty of limiting teams to 8 values :)

Do the employees use the product? For some companies it's incredibly important, and for others it's a non-starter (usually B2C).

I also don't drink, and in my (relatively short) experience in the tech industry, the term "social event" almost exclusively refers to events where the primary focus is alcohol. Is this a tech-industry specific thing, or just a thing with "industry" in general?

I don't know about advertising (and this is a throwaway account) but when we interview candidates, we're clear that our code base has a lot of legacy code and the quality is a mixed bag. We're also clear that while most of our development team wants to improve it, it's a slow process and can only be done in ways that don't slow down feature development.

Developers who are obsessed with code quality have been a mixed bag for us. Several of our best developers are the people who care the most about quality code and push hardest to improve it. On the other hand, we've had people who seem to care a lot about quality, but have no feel for the cost/benefit ratio of any given change, and spend more time complaining about code than actually working on it. The ability to talk about what good code looks like doesn't necessarily translate into the ability to improve flawed code.

Even just talking about what values your company has is very instructive and revealing. Sure, few people say "we don't value maintainable code", but if you're putting together a list of your four or five core values and you're coming up with things like "speed of execution", "rapid iteration" and you don't put anything about mainainability, the reality is you don't value that.

You might not object to it, but it just isn't important to you - you don't value it.

I wish I could find a similar list (that can be trusted to some extent) for my country (India) and all I would be looking for is - work-life balance.

I don't want to drink alcohol in office (if at all I am into alcohol). Instead of playing TT in office I would like to go for a swim, or a game of badminton, or a quite evening stroll.

Last time we discussed our values at work, we thought about what we were trading off and this helped us decide whether they really were important to us.

   1. Principle over loyalty.
   2. Empower individuals over institutions.
   3. Self-restraint over greed.
   4. Decisions based on reason, not ego.
   5. Give back to Open Source.

Also, some sort of structured data about company locations would be great, especially as the data set grows in size. Even if you don't display it yet, probably worth while to collect it now if you're not already so it can be added easily enough when necessary. I realize the open positions have location, but I might want to "follow" a local company w/o any open positions at the moment in case my or their situation changes.

Data collection is definitely the hardest part of this, so the more work you do to streamline and incentivize the UI and UX the better. For a first step, maybe use google spreadsheets convert to form feature?

It seems that you select the jobs by 'or-ing' the values so that the jobs are shown where at least one value matches.

I would prefer if you would 'and' the values so that I only see the positions that fulfill all the values that I have selected.

I had just blogged about the importance of culture last month [1] where I heard a talk from a CEO that grew his team rapidly to 60 strong, only to have to let 21 go in one day, due to a lack of cultural alignment.

[1] https://blog.routific.com/the-importance-of-startup-culture-...

1. Most people feel strongly that some subset of the "values" listed on Key Values don't belong there.

I interpret this as a success!

I've read hundreds of careers pages and countless job descriptions working on Key Values. You know what they all say? "Make an impact, learn a lot, and have fun doing it." I've also talked to and interviewed 100+ engineers to learn what they look for when changing jobs. You know what they always said? "I want to have real impact on the product, learn a lot in the process, and have fun at work."

When everyone checks all of the boxes, we don't get anywhere. I wanted to choose values that were general enough to appeal to multiple teams/people but divisive enough to only be selected by a few. Different values resonate with different people, and that's the whole point. (For the record: I will certainly add values that I've missed over time, but I doubt I will remove many.)

2. Many of us have strong opinions about what certain values signal about a team/company/organization.

These opinions say a lot about our previous experiences. Let me use myself as an example. When I first dropped out of grad school and joined a startup, I genuinely believed that "work/life balance" was a pseudonym for a lack of passion. "If you truly love what you're doing, you don't even call it work." A few years later, I was burned out and swung the other way. I wanted to establish a clear separation between work and personal, so I never worked weekends, never worked late, and never attended company happy hours. Now, I kind of crave that fast-paced, work with urgency kind of environment again. Right now, in this particular chapter in my life, I'd be a little sad if everyone went home at 5pm and I was working by myself until 8pm.

To piggy back on the work/life separation: I am a female in tech who no longer drinks alcohol but I still appreciate teams that do so professionally. My personal experiences with drinking at the workplace happen to all be goods ones. Sometimes introverted, socially-awkward people need a beer to loosen up and I really like connecting with my colleagues on a personal level. I don't feel left out or uncomfortable at events where everyone is drinking except for me, and I know that while this is true for me, it isn't for everyone else.

Sorry to compare looking for a job to dating again, but it works here too. We specifically look for things we didn't get enough of in our previous job/relationship when looking for new ones, and we specifically avoid things that we've made negative associations with in our past (we call them "red flags"). Everyone has their own set of personal experiences to draw from and use to navigate the world.

Thanks everyone for your thoughtful feedback and insightful discussions!

Finding a job is a lot like dating. People typically don't share their worst qualities upfront, and I decided early on that I didn't want to force them to. Instead, I've become more of a coach/cheerleader for both companies and job-seekers.

When I work with teams to write their profiles, it's my job to say, "prove it" when we discuss each value, and suggest that they choose another when they can't. I encourage teams to use strong language, talk about disqualifiers, include concrete examples, incorporate quantitative data, and/or provide links to contact current team members wherever possible. But, for now, I won't make anyone to do or say anything that they aren't comfortable with.

I hope job-seekers are critical when comparing different teams. Some profiles deserve an A+ while others are perhaps a B- (though I won't say which). If you interview 20 different teams, it'd probably be similar. Those that speak your language would resonate with you and those that fail to answer authentically to you would lose you. That's okay.

Ultimately, I'm providing structure for teams to talk about what is inherently subjective and messy. There is no black or white when it comes to culture or compatibility (maybe you've tried setting up two great individuals who just didn't hit it off?) but at least we now have some information to guide our decision making.

You've got people bringing home $150-350k/yr plus every imaginable perk fretting over the idea of putting in more than 40 hours a week. Even high-skilled high-pay workers (medicine, legal, and finance come to mind) put in lots of hours without whimpering about finding a balance, much less the vast percentage of the population who hold blue-collar jobs and clamor for overtime pay.

If someone doesn't feel they should work more than 40 hours, then by all means don't take that job, but please drop the damn sense of entitlement. This bubble will not last forever and one's ability to crank out an Uber-for-X clone in NodeJS won't always pay the bills.

Much better to know that from the start than get surprised during interviews or after you start.

see this recent article Aligns with this recent article. https://www.fastcompany.com/40420834/the-non-paradox-of-high...

"Workers / sq. ft" would be a good measurement.

My hope with Key Values is to:

1. Look beyond what companies say about themselves and focus on the culture and values of specific engineering teams.

2. Let job-seekers access information about engineering teams sooner (ie. before the hassles of applying, completing coding challenges, white-boarding, etc).

To your point, how interviewers describe their teams can be vastly different from how it actually is. Whether you "trust" that information or not, at least you have it sooner!