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

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

Good work

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-...

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!