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Show HN: Key Values – Find engineering teams that share your values
- calebm 9y agoI must say, I like the logo and name.
- the_arun 9y agoInteresting.. How do you get these key-values from companies?
- lynnetye 9y agoTeams self-select their values! I've worked closely with each team and they write their own profiles.
- mbesto 9y agoWouldn't every company say they just do everything? I mean, heck, I would...
- bonsai80 9y agoNah, people will just quit soon after. Then the company is faced with all the costs involved in hiring replacements. This idea works both ways, and ideally gets the right people into the right places for the benefit of the employees and employers.
- lynnetye 9y agoYes, this is why companies are limited to 8 values and are then asked to qualify their selections in their profiles. At the end of the day, teams are implicitly saying what they are not when they don't put it in their top 8.
- nasredin 9y agoI found this website to be excellent source material for the "PR Buzzword Bingo" (drinking) game.
- mrguyorama 9y agoI'm quite sad that I can't seem to find "Puts ethical considerations first" as one of the values. Possibly "Puts customers first", but that seems more like "drives value" or some other money oriented buzzword.
- danielvinson 9y ago"Puts customers first" and "Puts ethical considerations first" seem to be at odds in my mind... in my experience "Puts customers first" translates to "employees are overworked and underpayed" which is a huge ethical concern.
- lynnetye 9y agoThat's an interesting value and I will definitely consider adding it! In some ways, this describes companies that are B-Corps/PBC but I agree, it's not perfect.
- mrguyorama 9y agoIt's going to be difficult because there's no real ethical "Standard" in the space that I know of.
- lynnetye 9y agoI think that's okay actually. I see profiles to be like an interview with say, an engineering manager or current team members. We ask questions, they answer, and we decide how strong or convincing that answer is.
- lynnetye 9y agoHello! Lynne here, the creator of Key Values. I’m an indie hacker, and I've spent the last few months putting this together. I interviewed dozens of engineers to come up with a list of values: things we care about most when evaluating new opportunities. I then worked with engineering teams (which you see listed on Key Values) to identify the 8 values that best describe their engineering team and culture. I’m working to add more teams to the site and would love to hear from you!
- javajosh 9y agoI like the idea, but there are some important values missing from the list: 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. Thanks.
- Domenic_S 9y agoThese don't fit well into what OP's doing. What company in their right mind would say "We base our decisions on ego over reason"? Even though that might be true....
- nerdponx 9y agoThe data doesn't come from the company, it comes from individual employees who were interviewed.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoMany companies run decisions based on seniority. If you're on top, you choose. You have no responsibility to explain your choices, or have detailed reasoning. You earned the privilege of deciding through your success, and your continued status lives or dies by your continued success. That's very different from a company where the value is to be transparent, solicit input from everyone, and let decisions be questioned by underlings with rational concerns.
- ryanschneider 9y ago
- daxorid 9y agoSeems like this list of "values" takes one side exclusively, without offering a counter-option. I would like to see an IQ > EQ option, for example.
- Lxr 9y agoThis is relevant because otherwise companies can just claim they have all of the above.
- mayneack 9y agoabout 26 do https://i.imgur.com/QQqVyQX.png https://i.imgur.com/QQqVyQX.png
- teen 9y agoEQ isn't a real thing so I'm not sure if it matters
- humanrebar 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence
- alrehn 9y agoNot sure how much you can consider Work/Life balance a key value when you expect people to work 50 hour weeks (https://www.keyvalues.io/kite https://www.keyvalues.io/kite). Not to say that 50 hours is awful, there's certainly a lot worse out there, but I'd say it's enough to disqualify that as a 'key value'.
- ArchReaper 9y agoAny company that expects more than 40 hours a week should be automatically disqualified from picking 'work life balance' imo.
- jxcl 9y agoI agree that any company that asks for more than 40 hours should not be allowed to have the work/life balance key value. The profile says that the company eats dinner together and people go home at 8pm. That sounds pretty work centric and not much time for life left after that.
- alrehn 9y agoAlso they accompany it with a picture of a fun work outing. Those can be great, but should go with some other key value. When I think of work/life balance I think of having time to myself, to relax, see friends/family and work on other things/hobbies. Company events are nice and I think a good idea in terms of teambuilding but they are still on the side of work, not life.
- busterarm 9y agoAlso might say that they value their employees being young, single and childless.
- humanrebar 9y agoIf everyone comes in at noon, that seems fine to me. It's not for everyone, but it's not overworking.
- rvanmil 9y agoApparently the teams self-select their values, so it looks like these poor souls actually think that working 50 hours a week and eating dinner at the office is good work/life balance.
- jarsin 9y agoI would like to see values experience over ability to solve trick question on whiteboard.
- Lxr 9y agoCool idea! I would love to see some more opinionated product-oriented values, eg large js frameworks vs minimal client side code, tracking vs privacy, etc.
- hendler 9y agoI second this. Additionally, would be interesting to also see these vectors on public policy issues. While DACA might have little variation, differentiation may come from issues affecting work forces and tech policy (subsidies, public programs, etc.) see this recent article Aligns with this recent article. https://www.fastcompany.com/40420834/the-non-paradox-of-highly-successful-profit-from-purpose-businesses https://www.fastcompany.com/40420834/the-non-paradox-of-high...
- mgkimsal 9y agowhat also might be useful is to have reviews from former employees, and see how well they line up with what the team said. I've worked on a few teams that claimed these "values" (or practices) but when the rubber hit the road, what they said and what they did didn't match up.
- wott 9y agoI see "uses agile methodologies" but I was expecting "doesn't use agile methodologies"...
- rhodysurf 9y agoIts a little ironic that monetary compensation isnt on the list
- prawn 9y agoAren't there enough job sites out there focusing on exactly that? This looks to be someone trying to differentiate.
- notyourday 9y agoThe reason why it is called a job and not a hobby is because those who do it expect money. The elephant in a room is money, not a company outing or 50 hour weeks.
- prawn 9y agoA lot of people are willing to trade some of that financial expectation for a job they enjoy more whether it's because they can escape at 5pm or stay for regular team dinners, or for any of the other reasons on the site.
- ACow_Adonis 9y agoI don't know if I got it from Hacker News, but I've adopted the position that workplace "values" don't mean anything unless they're: a) verifiable and/or b) someone could reasonably disagree with it/would actively select its negation or opposite. Take the work/life balance, which a number of people are, justifiably in my opinion, taking issue with. Under the verifiable condition, we need to be able to see that someone actually lives up to that value, otherwise its just a marketing term to try to fool candidates (and becomes more of a trap, rather than helpful). So do team members work 40 hours or less per week? Do you provide sick/personal leave? Do you provide 4+ weeks of paid vacation (and people actually take it)? Can you take community/charity days? Ok, then you get to list yourself under work/life balance. If those things seem antithetical to you, or they don't happen in practice, I'm sorry, but you should be excluded, no matter what you say you value. Lets then look at criteria b). Would someone reasonably agree with its negation? Well, the easiest way to test that would be to ensure you actually list the negation of all your values and see whether anyone selects them or whether you're willing to put anyone in those categories. So for work/life balance, what about the teams that say "we do NOT value work/life balance: we want long hours, give yourself to the team". We know they're out there in practice, and some tech types might even self-select into such, but if you or no one else is publicly willing to be listed under such a category, then unfortunately the category and its negation becomes "fluff-worthy". Meaningless. Analytical noise. So for instance, take the following oppositions: -team is diverse vs team uniformity -work/life balance vs work priority -bonded by love of product vs feelings for product not important -eq > iq vs iq > eq -thoughtful office layout vs horrible/don't care about office layout and so forth. If you could verify the value, and have their negation as categories, and people actually listed under their negation, then many categories become EXTREMELY useful. But if the values aren't verified, and if people wouldn't reasonably list or accept a categories negation, while I appreciate the concept/thought, well...it basically becomes corporate fluff :/ Edit: There are a couple of categories where I admit having the category without its negation is useful. Things like "uses agile methodologies" could be a candidate for example. But...even there, i would love for the alternative category "Hates scrum/agile consultants" :P
- madamelic 9y ago>thoughtful office layout vs horrible/don't care about office layout "Workers / sq. ft" would be a good measurement.
- stockkid 9y agoOn mobile, when I click the number of matches on bottom right, I expect the screen to slide to the result section. Good work
- madamelic 9y agoCan you add negation, like I do not want a company with "X"?
- shimon 9y agoWhat are you trying to accomplish here? It looks like a nicely structured rigorous filtering tool based on values. But when you view the details for any company, it's not really rigorous. It's a narrative from the company with a clearly positive bias. Now, getting more narrative content about companies is great (most companies don't do much of this) but the value you're creating here is a better "what's it like to work here" page that a company might want to share with prospective employees. It's not going to really help people find meaningful values-based matches, because the "pick your top N" ranking methodology is lousy and too subjective. As other have pointed out, there should be some max-hours rule if you want to claim to value work-life balance. The degree to which a culture is Eng/product/design/data-driven is really important to gauge fit, but this rank methodology will not give you credible answers to that. It would be better to look at the backlog of work and count who wrote the tickets - that would be eye-opening, and also help you identify negative attributes ("driven by highly-paid persons' opinions"). Other important things you've identified, like "high employee retention", would be far better off as quantitative data points instead of self-ranking. On the other hand, maybe this is a feature, not a bug. You're trying to get engineers to voice preferences on values, and if that gets them to pay attention to your site as a source of jobs, and you continue to feature awesome companies that are great places to work, you will place some of those engineers in those companies. In this case, your product should probably do a better job of helping an engineer understand her own values. Again this would be better served with tradeoffs (Would you work 60-hour weeks in order to work with world-famous engineers? If most of the company participates in a push-up competition, would you find that exciting or off-putting?) than pick-8. Still, it's great to see someone starting from the premise that personal value should align with organizational ones. Best wishes!
- lynnetye 9y agoYou make a lot of great points! 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.
- mayneack 9y ago26 companies have "all" values apparently https://i.imgur.com/QQqVyQX.png https://i.imgur.com/QQqVyQX.png
- arjie 9y agoPractically all the advice here is rubbish in my opinion. As a user, allow me to request the following: * Please do not attempt to make it an objective rating of values * Please do not make it so I must rank values * Please do not auto-disallow values based on your interpretation of them (like this 8 PM going-home being incompatible with work/life) * Please do not list which frameworks they use and whatnot I like this site because it's simple. When I select a set of values, I get a few matches. I'm not left wondering if I missed out on companies because somewhere in the list of 1024 values there was one I didn't select. And I like that you let teams choose what they think is most important and had a maximum number of values they could select. Great work.
- lynnetye 9y agoDuly noted ;) Thanks arjie!
- gramakri 9y agoOn firefox/linux, the icons are off the grid. http://imgur.com/a/qakod http://imgur.com/a/qakod They align back when hovered over
- darioush 9y agoOne thing I'd love to filter on is "Gives developers private/shared offices" as opposed to open-floor. Also would be nice to filter on workflow/tools like git vs. perforce, or outlook vs. Google calendar, or TFS vs JIRA.
- Adamantcheese 9y ago> Good for junior devs > 0 matches Guess I'll just go to the sideline and wait until something actually populates that spot, if ever.
- lynnetye 9y agoThey're coming! I promise :)
- heisnotanalien 9y agoI dont really get it. It seems like every company aspires to all of those values.
- astonex 9y agoIt's a nice idea but I find how a company likes to describe itself can be vastly different to how it actually is.
- lynnetye 9y agoSure that's true, but then the only way to really know what it's like to work at a company is to spend 4-12 weeks working there yourself. Some would argue that that is still not enough time to form a real opinion. 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!
- ctraynor 9y agoThese are interesting but fairly generic and easy for a company to claim many to look good. When defining culture I think it's best to avoid generalisations and have specifics: - If something breaks, what is more important: Preserving state for debuggability or getting online fast - Developers can always say they are not ready to push and continue testing - There are defined SLI's and error budgets - Design docs are required for new functionality - Senior developers are expected to {mentor junior developers, be proactive in creating tooling, understand the full technology stack, refactor} - Sliding scale of time spent on feature development vs keeping on top of technical debt - How much time is spent on automation - Are there well defined leadership tracks for technical and management (a yes/no isn't really enough here) - Onboarding/mentoring, paired with a senior developer or a hire that joined ~6 months ago There are a lot more engineering culture questions based on ownership, communication, personal development and specific engineering tradeoffs.
- Jemaclus 9y agoI would second the option to negate some of these "values." There are about eight that I don't consider to be "values", but just to pick one of them at random, I don't consider "has good beer" to be a value I look for in a company. In fact, I consider a focus on alcohol in the workplace to be a red flag and would like the ability to filter out a place like that. In my experience, workplaces with alcohol in them tend to focus their work-related happy hours around drinking. As someone who does not drink, I often feel left out of those social activities, and am often actively shamed for not participating. Some of the "values" are kind of ambiguous. How do you quantify "bonded by love of product"? What does that even mean? Doesn't everyone consider themselves "Creative + Innovative" and "Customer Comes First"? Would anyone advertise a company that doesn't have a "High Quality Codebase"? I do like the overall idea of the site and the filtering mechanisms. I'm glad you're considering adding more "values" to the system, and hope you can add some more nuanced selection of those values (i.e., negation). You're approaching this from a tough but clever angle, and it'll be a lot of work to tweak it and get it right. Keep it up. Also, site looks beautiful. Love the logo.
- sanityUnbounded 9y agoThis isn't related to the website but I also share the same sentiment towards alcohol in the workplace. It is amazing how a beverage can change an employees outlook on a company. On the company side though, it's an easy/inexpensive way to build culture. People are strange.
- peternicky 9y agoIt's also a way to isolate team members who don't drink. You may think it's an "easy" way to build a team and yes perhaps that does hold true for some groups but overall, this attitude that having pseudorandom happy hours (in my opinion) flawed and is opposite of the current PC movement in the industry.
- john117-theline 9y agoI wonder if it would be some consolation if they provided non-alcoholic tasty mocktails as well.
- drdaeman 9y agoUh. I'm sorry about the tone, but about a half of that looks like they were taken straight out of some buzzword bingo. Things like "thoughtful office layout", "ideal for parents" or "has good beer" are almost meaningless, as they're really a matter of personal tastes and ideals. Take large enough number of people, and while there probably will be some general direction, I'm sure they'll inevitably come with very different ideas what it could mean. Even stuff like "uses agile methodologies" is not really meaningful. Too many different approaches and implementations out there. Some can't imagine work without every single tiniest thing being filed as a separate ticket (because otherwise they feel like losing track of things), some believe that's insane micromanagement, borderline OCD. Both could say they're doing it "agile, just in the sane way". ;) Also, I think many values really lack their opposites. I think it would be useful to be able to search for e.g. places that value age-proven tech over latest fads. Or places that specifically don't market themselves as "creative and innovative" but just doing what they believe is good, needed and profitable. Or places where engineers aren't expected to do stuff outside of their scope (as opposed to wearing many hats). That all may sound as bad things to some, but I'm certain there are persons who have different mindsets and treat that as positive values. That said, maybe at least some values are better as some sort of gauges rather than statements? In particular, "risk-taking vs stability" and "cutting-edge technologies" looks like good candidates for the e.g. "1: we're writing software for a nuclear plant" <-> "10: we develop live on the production servers" scale.
- besh 9y agoNeat idea. Once you have enough content, I think it would be beneficial to have location as one of the key values.
- john_moscow 9y agoHow about "an actual workplace where people act as professionals, not another social club where everyone's desperately trying to look like a cute teddy bear"?
- nether 9y agoPlagued with millennial self-obsessed fluff. Ugh. https://youtu.be/Sz0o9clVQu8 https://youtu.be/Sz0o9clVQu8
- innocentoldguy 9y agoMaybe I missed it, but I consider companies that DON'T embrace an open workspace as my top value. I also don't consider pair programming a value. I don't mind doing it on occasion, but I don't want it foisted upon me as a part of my daily work-life.
- anotherbrownguy 9y agoWhen I select multiple values, I expected the result to be companies which share all of those values, not all companies which share at least one of the values (which is what it does now).
- wbillingsley 9y agoTo coin a cynical phrase, every job in the world advertises it requires excellent communication skills, and yet somehow they all get hired...
- LyndsySimon 9y agoI was originally going to point out what I would like to see changed/added to the site - but after considering it and reading the other comments here, I don't think I'd add much constructive. Instead I offer my congratulations - you've shipped a product, on your own, that is both useful and interesting to a wide audience. That's something that I've tried to do in the past and repeatedly failed to achieve. Keep up the good work :)
- sAbakumoff 9y agoWhat if my key value is money? Is there any hope for me after all?
- peternicky 9y agoWhat is the process for adding a company? How are these so-called values verified as being true for a given company?