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

keyvalues.io

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

#81

Post by zippergz »

flachsechs wrote: post #76
Jemaclus wrote: post #67

I 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…

just a second voice to add -- i do drink, but still don't appreciate alcohol in the workplace or cultures that are focused around after-work drinking. it's something i do with friends and family, not coworkers, and especially not my boss or subordinates.

I totally agree. I drink, just not with co-workers.

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

#82

Post by lynnetye »

astonex wrote: post #62

It's a nice idea but I find how a company likes to describe itself can be vastly different to how it actually is.

Sure 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!

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

#83

Post by nerdponx »

lynnetye wrote: post #7

Hello! 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…

What's your plan to continue eliciting and updating the data on your site? And what kind of sampling methodology do you use for choosing engineers to interview?

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

#84

Post by nerdponx »

Domenic_S wrote: post #53
javajosh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

These 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....

The data doesn't come from the company, it comes from individual employees who were interviewed.

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

#85

Post by Volt »

meritt wrote: post #51
alrehn wrote: post #10

Not 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 ). 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'.

Every time work/life balance comes up I get so damn annoyed with this uniquely tech-centric viewpoint. You've got people bringing home $150-350k/yr plus every imaginable perk fretting over the idea of putting in more than 40 hours a week. Even high-skilled high-pay workers (medicine, legal, and finance come to mind) put in lots of hours without whimpering about finding a balance, much less the vast percentage of the…

>You've got people bringing home $150-350k/yr plus every imaginable perk

So now you've made this assumption.

I get what you're saying, but you also have to understand that there are people willing to give up salary for more free time, and these people are therefore allowed to ask for fewer hours. There's no entitlement here.

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

#86

Post by aqme28 »

Jemaclus wrote: post #67

I 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…

Love of product makes total sense to me.

Do the employees use the product? For some companies it's incredibly important, and for others it's a non-starter (usually B2C).

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

#87

Post by aqme28 »

lynnetye wrote: post #7

Hello! 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…

I strongly think you should add company (or at least engineering org) size to this. A company that's less than 100 people is very different from a company over 1000, all other values being equal.

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

#88

Post by aqme28 »

slavapestov wrote: post #48
alexryan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really great idea. Please consider adding value ranking. For example, many people might value both meritocracy and diversity but valuing one more highly than another creates a completely different culture. P.S. Please consider adding "meritocracy" as a value.

You can't really have one without the other. It's not really meritocracy if you're excluding a large portion of your candidate pool due to bias.

I really don't understand this meme. I've never seen a company where I felt like straight white males (myself being one of them) were excluded due to diversity initiatives. We're still pretty well-represented at even the most staunchly pro-diversity companies.

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

#89

Post by saghm »

Jemaclus wrote: post #67

I 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…

> 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.

I also don't drink, and in my (relatively short) experience in the tech industry, the term "social event" almost exclusively refers to events where the primary focus is alcohol. Is this a tech-industry specific thing, or just a thing with "industry" in general?

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

#90

Post by badcodehere »

Jemaclus wrote: post #67

I 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…

> Would anyone advertise a company that doesn't have a "High Quality Codebase"?

I don't know about advertising (and this is a throwaway account) but when we interview candidates, we're clear that our code base has a lot of legacy code and the quality is a mixed bag. We're also clear that while most of our development team wants to improve it, it's a slow process and can only be done in ways that don't slow down feature development.

Developers who are obsessed with code quality have been a mixed bag for us. Several of our best developers are the people who care the most about quality code and push hardest to improve it. On the other hand, we've had people who seem to care a lot about quality, but have no feel for the cost/benefit ratio of any given change, and spend more time complaining about code than actually working on it. The ability to talk about what good code looks like doesn't necessarily translate into the ability to improve flawed code.

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