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Show HN: WorkDNA – Attract engineers by showing off your engineering culture

67 points by bwb 7y ago

bwb 7y ago
Hi all, OP here. We think that hiring is stuck in the dark ages. Engineering candidates have zero visibility into what it is like to work on an engineering team. They either have to have a friend working there, trust what the recruiter says, or invest a lot of time in the interview process. As a result, looking for a job is like putting an offer on a house, but without knowing how many bedrooms or bathrooms it has. We want to change this and make it easier for smaller engineering teams to attract great engineers. How? Our software platform creates a careers site for engineering teams (the above link has an example profile). We show engineering candidates the team's culture, work schedule, technology, and methodologies. Plus a Q&A so candidates can ask questions before they even apply. The goal is to give engineers the info they need to get excited about the idea of a new job. And, give engineering teams a way to connect and attract more engineers who are a culture match. What do you think? Feedback always appreciated :)
- kovacs 7y ago
  I think solving this problem is a great idea and is something I've thought of building a product around myself. I just haven't acted on it and haven't gotten clear on what such a problem/solution would look like. Congrats on launching! I'm no legal expert but I would suspect there could be a point of friction with legal teams inside companies. Things like liability for hiring practices, IP leakage, and security. Not to dissuade you but just some thoughts about possible challenges that might work against the goal of transparency.
  - bwb 7y ago
    Yep great point, in most cases it hasn't been two bad with our first batch of clients. Most companies that want to use a product like this already have a great culture and open mindset we have found thus far.
- Insanity 7y ago
  Hey! I like the general idea, just a small bit of feedback.. The comments are going to seem fake if they come from current employees. Something like glassdoor might be better suited for that. No employee (or founder) is going to post bad things about their own company of course. This website gives you a view of what the founders might _think_ their company culture is like, but not what it's actually like. Sorry, I can't give a solution to that, just a problem statement :(
  - bwb 7y ago
    We gather those directly from the team ourselves. You are correct though. The point of the employee feedback is not to be negative, it is to highlight what the company is doing right in the words of individual team members. This is like a dating profile. You don't write a dating profile to explain why they shouldn't date you :), you show them what you are about and what you doing well at. We want to give job seekers this info so they filter and find companies that might be a match for them. And, make it easy to get that first date so they can see if this company is a good match for them or not.
- mountainboot 7y ago
  My initial thoughts are that this does not actually tell me anything. Take this... "What traits do you value in engineering managers and leadership?" "Servant leadership is everything to us. We want managers and leaders who are humble and know that their role is to support their teams and make sure nothing is standing in the way of doing great work. So not only work blockers but also ensuring our team has the time and energy to balance their personal lives with their work lives." Every company I have ever worked for claims something similar. This doesn't actually tell me anything. I would still need an inside person to tell me how it actually is to work at the company.
  - bwb 7y ago
    Yep, one thing that is part of our process is pulling specifics for how they support that value/trait. That means how they spend time or money to provide that value to the team. You might have two companies that each list "Cross Department Teams" but how they actually implement that tells you so much about them (along with specific examples gathered from the individual engineers). We want to show how the company delivers on that value/trait, and what individual engineers say as well. We know we can't be as good as the friend who is on the inside. But, we are trying to get closer to that gold standard.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    In the past year or so I noticed a lot of companies started having a set of "values" that are (or used to be) just common sense. Like things that you'd be doing anyway if you were a decent human being but now they are official company "values" and they even had an interview process around those. Of course, those values magically go out the window when an incident gives the higher-ups a reason to cover their ass.
- codingdave 7y ago
  I totally would love this as a candidate. But I don't see any incentive as a company to fill out a profile. I could write all this on my hiring page of my own web site already. And now that I think of it - even if I am a candidate, this is still just the company saying what they want, so how is this any different than just trusting what the recruiter says?
  - bwb 7y ago
    Great Q! Companies pay us to become their engineering careers page. Not only does this profile 10x the response rate for any recruiter outreach, but it also builds an ongoing pipeline of interested engineers who like the culture and engineering practices they see described. For small to medium size companies this is huge as they can show candidates what they are about. This helps them fill the top of the funnel instead of fighting to get candidates to even respond. It is kinda like a dating profile. You don't jump straight to marriage from a dating profile, you just get enough information to filter who you want to go on a first date with. So, how is it different than a recruiter? A recruiter gets paid when you join the company. This is the company explaining who they are and how they work and then letting you decide if you want to have a chat and see if you are a match. In our minds that is a big difference. And, with our setup you can ask engineers at the companies questions you have anonymously.
    - polishdude20 7y ago
      I don't think many companies in software are fighting to get them to respond. Our want candidates to respond? Offer more money. Usually it's the opposite where job seekers are fighting to get companies to respond.
      - remyp 7y ago
        Hiring developers when you're a small or medium size company is really hard. Nobody knows you exist and if they do there's no way you can compete with FAANG compensation. So what can you do? You show off what makes you different, whether it's cool technology, family friendliness, remote work, etc.
- koikikoi 7y ago
  In these sad times where anybody with a 2 month bootcamp course call himself/herself engineer, we should be more careful when using the words engineer and engineering. It is not just fair for the actual engineers that have to pass technical and ethical exams to be considered as such.
Feeble 7y ago
What is your pricing? Also, can the resulting page be customized with company identity and/or hosted under own domain name? E.g. workdna.company.com
- bwb 7y ago
  Yep hit me up at ben@workdna.com, we just launched our first customers so money isn't as important to us as finding the right partners to give us feedback as we build this for them. Yep we've been doing these from: workdna.com/companyname and we are talking with some of our customers about mapping this to custom domain names. I'd love to chat!
choward 7y ago
So it's a job posting just formatted differently? I don't get it.
- bwb 7y ago
  The difference in our minds is the level of information we provide that goes far beyond any job posting I've ever seen. And, so far beyond the generic careers pages you see everywhere.
dannykwells 7y ago
Sorry OP, but my feeling is, without quantitative metrics, this is useless. As others have said, each company will choose only positive things, and it will be hard to tell companies apart. What I really want, and no one has made, is for some comprehensive scraping of LinkedIn and Crunchbase to help answer the following questions for each company: - Average turn over time for different job types - Average experience of new engineers (new grad vs. 10 years) - Distribution of management vs. engineers vs. PMs etc. - Are management promoted from engineering or hired from outside? - Have the founders had successful companies before? In the same area or different? - What schools did employees go to? What is the education distribution of employees? - what's the gender/race/etc. make up? (Does the company actually value diversity) etc. Answer those, comprehensively, and I'd easily pay for access to that service. Alternatively, if you are having companies post jobs, have them answer those questions (and tell them you'll check against LI/CB). i.e., get actual transparency where it matters, not just fake/propaganda transparency like you have here. That would actually help me make a decision to apply or not.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  Some of those things you can figure out on Glassdoor, though I guess having quantitative metrics are better than reviews from disgruntled employees. I like this idea, but unfortunately it hangs on the existence of LinkedIn. If for whatever reason LinkedIn changes its structure in a way that makes it impossible to easily obtain this data, such a service would probably sink. > - What schools did employees go to? What is the education distribution of employees? How would you interpret this information? EDIT: On a somewhat related note, I had a side project a while ago that was kind of the inverse, which was a tool for employers where they could track their employee's LinkedIn activity to determine whether an employee was actively looking for another job or likely to quit soon, allowing employers to preemptively fire employees that didn't have a future with the company. I decided not to finish it because I thought it would be a terrible thing to have exist.
  - ghostpepper 7y ago
    >a tool for employers where they could track their employee's LinkedIn activity to determine whether an employee was actively looking for another job or likely to quit soon, allowing employers to preemptively fire employees that didn't have a future with the company While I applaud you for taking the social/ethical value of your work into consideration, I have to wonder how this even seemed like a good idea in the first place?
ummonk 7y ago
What differentiates this from https://www.keyvalues.com https://www.keyvalues.com ?
- whalesalad 7y ago
  They’re both a bunch of BS virtue signaling. I’ve yet to join a company that operates anything like it says it does from an external/marketing perspective. The only way to know what you’re getting into is to join, or hopefully learn it during the hiring process.
  - bwb 7y ago
    The problem is that most people won't take that risk. We interviewed 60+ engineers and they wanted to know more about what it is like to work at a company in order to better filter who might be a fit. It is about explaining who you are and how you back that with specific actions. Not to mention technical practices and methodologies.
  - PascLeRasc 7y ago
    After being in the corporate world for a few years, I feel like if a company has to explicitly say their mission statement or whatever, they're a bad employer. It's like someone saying "I'm a nice and relaxed person". Let other people say that about you, and if they aren't then try to change that instead of just declaring it. If your company has a good culture and impact, that will be obvious.
- bwb 7y ago
  I love KV and think it is a great idea! We are a different in that we are building a robust career pages for engineering teams that are specifically designed to attract engineers. It is more than just the culture, it is about showing what it is like to work on the team and help the company build a pipeline of great talent with a variety of features/outreach.
soozzoos 7y ago
Reminds me of keyvalues.com
- s3nnyy 7y ago
  exists since 2-3 years, inspired by it maybe?
  - bwb 7y ago
    I love what Lynne has built! Def part of our inspiration, but very different from what she is up too.
paulcole 7y ago
How does: > We all start by 9am and finish up by 6pm. Jive with: > Flexible Schedule And: > Strict 40 hour work week
- remyp 7y ago
  It's a demo profile, not a real company :)
  - paulcole 7y ago
    Gives me a lot of faith they can’t even be bothered to get the details right in a demo.
    - bwb 7y ago
      Ouch, someone is a bit grumpy today :) Sorry for the mistake, we are building something over here.
      - paulcole 7y ago
        You’re building something that is inevitably going to be exploited by companies to bend the truth and paint themselves in the best possible light — just like every other culture/recruiting tool in existence. If this was a demo for companies showing how easy it is for them to say 2 things at once and not be held to the truth, then well done :)
        bwb 7y ago
        We are building something for engineers to use to better discover and vet companies :). I appreciate your feedback, feel free to hit me up at ben@workdna.com if you would like to chat more as you seem very passionate about this and I'd love to hear how you have been burned in the past. Some of the best insights we got while interviewing and testing with engineers were the questions they used to test companies given how they have been burned at past companies or by recruiters.
  - 7y ago

67 points by bwb 7y ago

bwb 7y ago

Hi all, OP here. We think that hiring is stuck in the dark ages. Engineering candidates have zero visibility into what it is like to work on an engineering team. They either have to have a friend working there, trust what the recruiter says, or invest a lot of time in the interview process. As a result, looking for a job is like putting an offer on a house, but without knowing how many bedrooms or bathrooms it has. We want to change this and make it easier for smaller engineering teams to attract great engineers. How? Our software platform creates a careers site for engineering teams (the above link has an example profile). We show engineering candidates the team's culture, work schedule, technology, and methodologies. Plus a Q&A so candidates can ask questions before they even apply. The goal is to give engineers the info they need to get excited about the idea of a new job. And, give engineering teams a way to connect and attract more engineers who are a culture match. What do you think? Feedback always appreciated :)

kovacs 7y ago
I think solving this problem is a great idea and is something I've thought of building a product around myself. I just haven't acted on it and haven't gotten clear on what such a problem/solution would look like. Congrats on launching! I'm no legal expert but I would suspect there could be a point of friction with legal teams inside companies. Things like liability for hiring practices, IP leakage, and security. Not to dissuade you but just some thoughts about possible challenges that might work against the goal of transparency.
- bwb 7y ago
  Yep great point, in most cases it hasn't been two bad with our first batch of clients. Most companies that want to use a product like this already have a great culture and open mindset we have found thus far.
Insanity 7y ago
Hey! I like the general idea, just a small bit of feedback.. The comments are going to seem fake if they come from current employees. Something like glassdoor might be better suited for that. No employee (or founder) is going to post bad things about their own company of course. This website gives you a view of what the founders might _think_ their company culture is like, but not what it's actually like. Sorry, I can't give a solution to that, just a problem statement :(
- bwb 7y ago
  We gather those directly from the team ourselves. You are correct though. The point of the employee feedback is not to be negative, it is to highlight what the company is doing right in the words of individual team members. This is like a dating profile. You don't write a dating profile to explain why they shouldn't date you :), you show them what you are about and what you doing well at. We want to give job seekers this info so they filter and find companies that might be a match for them. And, make it easy to get that first date so they can see if this company is a good match for them or not.
mountainboot 7y ago
My initial thoughts are that this does not actually tell me anything. Take this... "What traits do you value in engineering managers and leadership?" "Servant leadership is everything to us. We want managers and leaders who are humble and know that their role is to support their teams and make sure nothing is standing in the way of doing great work. So not only work blockers but also ensuring our team has the time and energy to balance their personal lives with their work lives." Every company I have ever worked for claims something similar. This doesn't actually tell me anything. I would still need an inside person to tell me how it actually is to work at the company.
- bwb 7y ago
  Yep, one thing that is part of our process is pulling specifics for how they support that value/trait. That means how they spend time or money to provide that value to the team. You might have two companies that each list "Cross Department Teams" but how they actually implement that tells you so much about them (along with specific examples gathered from the individual engineers). We want to show how the company delivers on that value/trait, and what individual engineers say as well. We know we can't be as good as the friend who is on the inside. But, we are trying to get closer to that gold standard.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  In the past year or so I noticed a lot of companies started having a set of "values" that are (or used to be) just common sense. Like things that you'd be doing anyway if you were a decent human being but now they are official company "values" and they even had an interview process around those. Of course, those values magically go out the window when an incident gives the higher-ups a reason to cover their ass.
codingdave 7y ago
I totally would love this as a candidate. But I don't see any incentive as a company to fill out a profile. I could write all this on my hiring page of my own web site already. And now that I think of it - even if I am a candidate, this is still just the company saying what they want, so how is this any different than just trusting what the recruiter says?
- bwb 7y ago
  Great Q! Companies pay us to become their engineering careers page. Not only does this profile 10x the response rate for any recruiter outreach, but it also builds an ongoing pipeline of interested engineers who like the culture and engineering practices they see described. For small to medium size companies this is huge as they can show candidates what they are about. This helps them fill the top of the funnel instead of fighting to get candidates to even respond. It is kinda like a dating profile. You don't jump straight to marriage from a dating profile, you just get enough information to filter who you want to go on a first date with. So, how is it different than a recruiter? A recruiter gets paid when you join the company. This is the company explaining who they are and how they work and then letting you decide if you want to have a chat and see if you are a match. In our minds that is a big difference. And, with our setup you can ask engineers at the companies questions you have anonymously.
  - polishdude20 7y ago
    I don't think many companies in software are fighting to get them to respond. Our want candidates to respond? Offer more money. Usually it's the opposite where job seekers are fighting to get companies to respond.
    - remyp 7y ago
      Hiring developers when you're a small or medium size company is really hard. Nobody knows you exist and if they do there's no way you can compete with FAANG compensation. So what can you do? You show off what makes you different, whether it's cool technology, family friendliness, remote work, etc.
koikikoi 7y ago
In these sad times where anybody with a 2 month bootcamp course call himself/herself engineer, we should be more careful when using the words engineer and engineering. It is not just fair for the actual engineers that have to pass technical and ethical exams to be considered as such.

Feeble 7y ago

What is your pricing? Also, can the resulting page be customized with company identity and/or hosted under own domain name? E.g. workdna.company.com

bwb 7y ago
Yep hit me up at ben@workdna.com, we just launched our first customers so money isn't as important to us as finding the right partners to give us feedback as we build this for them. Yep we've been doing these from: workdna.com/companyname and we are talking with some of our customers about mapping this to custom domain names. I'd love to chat!

choward 7y ago

So it's a job posting just formatted differently? I don't get it.

bwb 7y ago
The difference in our minds is the level of information we provide that goes far beyond any job posting I've ever seen. And, so far beyond the generic careers pages you see everywhere.

dannykwells 7y ago

Sorry OP, but my feeling is, without quantitative metrics, this is useless. As others have said, each company will choose only positive things, and it will be hard to tell companies apart. What I really want, and no one has made, is for some comprehensive scraping of LinkedIn and Crunchbase to help answer the following questions for each company: - Average turn over time for different job types - Average experience of new engineers (new grad vs. 10 years) - Distribution of management vs. engineers vs. PMs etc. - Are management promoted from engineering or hired from outside? - Have the founders had successful companies before? In the same area or different? - What schools did employees go to? What is the education distribution of employees? - what's the gender/race/etc. make up? (Does the company actually value diversity) etc. Answer those, comprehensively, and I'd easily pay for access to that service. Alternatively, if you are having companies post jobs, have them answer those questions (and tell them you'll check against LI/CB). i.e., get actual transparency where it matters, not just fake/propaganda transparency like you have here. That would actually help me make a decision to apply or not.

ravenstine 7y ago
Some of those things you can figure out on Glassdoor, though I guess having quantitative metrics are better than reviews from disgruntled employees. I like this idea, but unfortunately it hangs on the existence of LinkedIn. If for whatever reason LinkedIn changes its structure in a way that makes it impossible to easily obtain this data, such a service would probably sink. > - What schools did employees go to? What is the education distribution of employees? How would you interpret this information? EDIT: On a somewhat related note, I had a side project a while ago that was kind of the inverse, which was a tool for employers where they could track their employee's LinkedIn activity to determine whether an employee was actively looking for another job or likely to quit soon, allowing employers to preemptively fire employees that didn't have a future with the company. I decided not to finish it because I thought it would be a terrible thing to have exist.
- ghostpepper 7y ago
  >a tool for employers where they could track their employee's LinkedIn activity to determine whether an employee was actively looking for another job or likely to quit soon, allowing employers to preemptively fire employees that didn't have a future with the company While I applaud you for taking the social/ethical value of your work into consideration, I have to wonder how this even seemed like a good idea in the first place?

ummonk 7y ago

What differentiates this from https://www.keyvalues.com https://www.keyvalues.com ?

whalesalad 7y ago
They’re both a bunch of BS virtue signaling. I’ve yet to join a company that operates anything like it says it does from an external/marketing perspective. The only way to know what you’re getting into is to join, or hopefully learn it during the hiring process.
- bwb 7y ago
  The problem is that most people won't take that risk. We interviewed 60+ engineers and they wanted to know more about what it is like to work at a company in order to better filter who might be a fit. It is about explaining who you are and how you back that with specific actions. Not to mention technical practices and methodologies.
- PascLeRasc 7y ago
  After being in the corporate world for a few years, I feel like if a company has to explicitly say their mission statement or whatever, they're a bad employer. It's like someone saying "I'm a nice and relaxed person". Let other people say that about you, and if they aren't then try to change that instead of just declaring it. If your company has a good culture and impact, that will be obvious.
bwb 7y ago
I love KV and think it is a great idea! We are a different in that we are building a robust career pages for engineering teams that are specifically designed to attract engineers. It is more than just the culture, it is about showing what it is like to work on the team and help the company build a pipeline of great talent with a variety of features/outreach.

soozzoos 7y ago

Reminds me of keyvalues.com

s3nnyy 7y ago
exists since 2-3 years, inspired by it maybe?
- bwb 7y ago
  I love what Lynne has built! Def part of our inspiration, but very different from what she is up too.

paulcole 7y ago

How does: > We all start by 9am and finish up by 6pm. Jive with: > Flexible Schedule And: > Strict 40 hour work week

remyp 7y ago
It's a demo profile, not a real company :)
- paulcole 7y ago
  Gives me a lot of faith they can’t even be bothered to get the details right in a demo.
  - bwb 7y ago
    Ouch, someone is a bit grumpy today :) Sorry for the mistake, we are building something over here.
    - paulcole 7y ago
      You’re building something that is inevitably going to be exploited by companies to bend the truth and paint themselves in the best possible light — just like every other culture/recruiting tool in existence. If this was a demo for companies showing how easy it is for them to say 2 things at once and not be held to the truth, then well done :)
      - bwb 7y ago
        We are building something for engineers to use to better discover and vet companies :). I appreciate your feedback, feel free to hit me up at ben@workdna.com if you would like to chat more as you seem very passionate about this and I'd love to hear how you have been burned in the past. Some of the best insights we got while interviewing and testing with engineers were the questions they used to test companies given how they have been burned at past companies or by recruiters.
- 7y ago