I 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)

I 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