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What 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 compan

by shimon 9y ago

What 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 ago
You 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.

by shimon 9y ago

lynnetye 9y ago

You 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.