Hi everyone, Lynne here! I built Key Values and launched it on HN 3 months ago. It's been a lot of fun as a solo founder, but definitely challenging too. One thing I'm trying to do is provide more valuable tools for anyone wanting to take a culture-first approach to their job search. So, to help people make the most of their interviews, and as an alternative to traditional content marketing, I built Culture Queries.
I'll continue adding questions over time, so feel free to contribute some if you have any! Thanks in advance for your feedback, and I'll be around to answer any questions you might have.
Ps. This is my first attempt at side project marketing (so much fun), and I highly recommend it to other developers.
Nice work on this! :) Got me to click around a bit. A few comments (from a design background, so your mileage may vary):
- Digging the 'don't ask' section to your answers - I'm personally of the mindset that knowing what not to do is even more important than knowing what to do. Would love to see this section for every tile, but I know that's a lot of tiles....
- having inline quotes (and sources) from big names/articles would make this feel even more credible and a little less same-y, imo. Right now it's just one point of view - but having a quote from Larry Page or whoever would make me inclined to agree even more. (Also it'd be interesting to see what names pop up where...)
- Would drop the 'I'm relatively new' in your about blurb at the top and before your twitter - doesn't add anything of value to the statements. Launching this successfully already tells me that you've jumped over most of the early hurdles to this kind of a project, so don't undersell yourself.
- Awesome. I wasn't sure if it came off too strong, so I only did it for a few. But I can definitely incorporate more "don'ts" as I add content and edit existing questions!
- Interesting thought, though I might disagree. The big names are people who haven't interviewed for a job in a really long time (in some cases, never have) and might not remember what it's like to be an applicant. I don't necessarily think you should ask questions just to impress an interviewer, you should also ask questions to get very needed answers to inform your decision.
- I really appreciate your saying this. I still feel like I need to state that up front, but I will say that my confidence has grown so much in the last 8 months.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful feedback and kind words!
That blur is clever. Kudous. One suggestion I have is to have another email submission field since I just got rid of the last one. I don't want to have to go looking for it. It actually took me a moment to remember where it was, since those pop ups are never something I pay attention to.
You can always refresh the page. I actually removed the second CTA yesterday to help focus user attention. You probably already know this, but most people don't do what you did ;)
That was clever and I had a good chuckle at it, too. I originally saved the page as a resource but a once-a-week email with this kind of material is definitely worth the time.
I would suggest something a little different actually: I found the easter egg because it seemed silly to put in my email address just to get 3 questions.
Suggestion: Put more blurred out, or a counter ("I'll send you X questions"), or something else that implies there is a bigger reward for the trade.
This is pretty neat! From the hiring side, I'd love to be able to use the same Culture Queries UI to list our company's key values and instead of getting a list of interview questions, get a list of tactics to improve or implement these cultural shifts.
I really like those questions! They seem more thought out than most of the stock interview questions a google search will show you. I definitely stopped as soon as I was asked for an email though. There's no way I'll give you my valuable email space just to see some interview questions.
I'm currently not charging for my service, so I decided that asking for an email address was fair. I was torn about how many questions to give "for free." I started with 9, but went down to 6 since I don't think interviewees have enough time to ask more than 2-5 questions in an interview any way.
Fair enough though. I'm also very stingy with my email address. Thanks for the feedback!
Realise I'm an outlier but here's some honest feedback anyway. I didn't get the page to work because too many external HTTP requests... not worth the time to resolve. Facebook + Google + Cloudfront + GA + Hotjar? My culture query is resolved.
It loads jquery from ajax.googleapis.com (I'd prefer it didn't, but ohwell). Other than that, you only need the domain unblocked for it to work (I also block js by default because I do not like it :) ).
“On a scale from 1 to it's-literally-the-worst, how much do you hate giving out your email address?
How often do you open up your inspector tool to bypass annoying shit on websites?”
Clever, that made me smile :-). But I’m still not giving you my email address and I’m still annoyed you don’t show me all the results. It would be nice if there was a “no thanks” option.
This is a great tool. I generally ask the question "what is your corporate culture". I think that with these questions you can get much closer to the ground truth of the organization you are interviewing for. Also, if you don't understand what you are getting into you can get burnt out and look for a new job.
I think this is a WONDERFUL idea, and executed incredibly well. This is a big help to me as I consider asking good questions a flaw in my interviewing game, and I'm aware that it has lead me to miss some really glaring flaws. I love the UX, too. All around great!
Looks like an amazing project! I've been a serial interviewee lots of times during my career, and having had this some time ago would have helped tons. I wrote an article exactly about this, hope it helps you!: http://www.developingandstuff.com/2016/01/10-questions-to-ma...
Hm. I'll try to debug that, thanks for telling me.
Key Values helps job-seeking engineers find teams that share their values. I'm not currently charging for my service, but will likely charge a monthly subscription to companies to post their profiles (and also charge to help curate them). Down the line, it's possible I'll always take a placement fee, but not set yet.
....and if you're a recruiter, these are the issues to address in your sales-pitch. I can't believe I still get cold emails to work for 80hr weeks but only if I am good enough.
"Are you good enough to be unpaid and overworked?! Then boy do I have the job for you!" - Recruiter who can't understand why they only get replies from entry level people
Great concept and website (and kudos on the witty domain name!). The questions (at least the ones I could see) are useful and it's great there are explanations of what you might want to pay attention to in the answer.
The only negative: I'm not a huge fan of having to enter my email to see all the questions. Isn't there some other way?
I giving everything else for free, so I decided it'd be okay to ask for an email address. While I hope you won't, you can always unsubscribe. (Ps. I replied to a similar comment elsewhere.)
You should be aware that you might be subject to GDPR - after May, gaining consent in this sort of way (as a precondition of receiving a service) isn't going to be legal in the EU any more. I'm guessing you're in the US, but this may be applicable to you as well, as some of the people accessing your site will be from the EU.
I've done a lot of interviews for work, and I make it very clear to the candidate that the questions they ask me won't be used to evaluate them and that they are purely for their benefit.
Candidates have just had a very stressful interview, I don't want them to have to worry about choosing to impress me versus getting the information they really seek. Obviously this doesn't apply if they ask questions that reveal massive red flags (like something utterly racist or sexist) but so far that's never happened in over 70+ interviews.
To emphasize the fact that questions are for the benefit of the interviewee, if I'm interviewing someone that's foreign and I happen to speak their language, after the interview is over I close the computer and switch to their language to make it clear that we are now having a conversation and they can relax and be informal.
I suspect from your comment that you didn't go through and submit the form on the page. It doesn't give you questions to ask to make yourself look good, but gives you questions to ask to get the "real" answers to things that are important to you.
For example, you can't just ask your interviewer "how's the work-life balance here?" for the same reason as your interviewer isn't going to ask you "do you have a good work ethic?" -- because there's an obviously "right" answer so you're not going to get much useful information out of it. If you select that you're interested in work-life balance, this application suggests you ask something along the lines of "How responsive are people to emails/Slack over the weekends and after 6pm?" and provides a brief explanation of why you might ask that question and how it relates to your actual interest. IMO it's a great basis for a question to ask because it doesn't have an obviously "right" answer, though personally I would tweak it somewhat.
Overall this application seems very thoughtfully put together and I am impressed.
On the other hand, I find questions such as "how responsive are people to emails/Slack over the weekends and after 6pm?" utterly loathsome.
It is immediately obvious that the question is just a veiled attempt at asking about the work-life balance.
From the perspective of both the interviewee and the interviewer, I much rather prefer the more straightforward question "how's the work life balance here?", with the expectation that the interviewer is honest enough to engage in an healthy, open discussion on the topic.
"Loathsome", really? It may be obvious to you, but it demands a level of specificity that the interviewer is much less likely to lie about. Every company will tell you that they have a good work life balance because that's a completely nebulous claim. If you ask about after-hours communication they're more likely to give you an accurate answer.
It's like if I ask you "do you think you're a good person" where you have a financial incentive to justify why you're a good person and a disincentive to just why you aren't. You're going to emphasize the good points and neglect the bad points to make yourself look the best. Company recruiters are evaluated on equivalent metrics (at least indirectly) so of course they'll give you the sunshine-and-rainbows view of the business. The more direct your question, the more egregious any lie becomes, so the more likely you are to hear the truth.
I worked at a company known for over-working employees (mostly technical, non-devs, though) where the HR recruiters would always go on and on about only ever having to work 45 hours a week max during release pushes... then in orientation the (9-10 figures net worth) CEO told you that they "didn't believe in a work-life balance", and they favored a "work-life integration" instead. Those are obviously complete opposites, and a more direct question to the recruiters could have revealed that discrepancy. In fact that disgusting lie of omission turned me off from the company so much that I found a job elsewhere pretty soon thereafter.
The goal as an interviewer is not to trigger the "HR alarms" that require you to lie or spread the truth thin. If you ask a quantifiable question like "how often do people work over 40 hours?" you're more likely to get a truly revealing answer.
Interesting, why do you loathe that question? I don't view it as a veiled attempt to get info or a way to trick the interviewer.
To me, it's a specific way to measure work life balance. Most HR departments love to preach work life balance, but if the entire team is expected to be responsive during off hours then you have a problem. When asked "how's your work life balance?" it's easy to answer "good" without much reflection. Asking specifics helps get to the reality quicker and is more likely to get specific details.
Erm, i would wager a question like that is intentionally transparent. and it is not as if these questions have to be said without elaboration. in my opinion it can be helpful to start conversations on subjective topics with an example, to suggest what one is looking for (or looking to avoid), or otherwise provide context on what may violate the work life balance for the particular individual.
For less experienced interviewees it may be vital to provide an example or boundary. Maybe the interviewee doesn't know how to respond to a reply of, "Yes, we have good work life balance." Even if the interviewee asked for elaboration on why it's good, that can give a perfect stage for the interviewer to say what wants to be heard instead of providing specific examples (i don't mean to say this is always malicious behavior, though sadly I'm sure that happens too).
I generally don't get too many questions worth putting on interview feedback -- they can ask questions to get the information they need to make a decision.
However I make note of it for two cases. A) when they seem to be trying to ask the 'right questions; especially when they dominate the direction of the interview and we don't have enough time for my technical question. B) when they're asking questions that seem to indicate a preference for process that isn't a good fit for what we do: it doesn't affect my decision, but it may affect theirs, so I'll want to check that it came up with other interviewers and ensure that it's something the candidate is aware of if we give them an offer. Testing and deployment can be a big part of a job, and if you have strong opinions, you may not want to work somewhere that does things 'wrong'
These are good questions with good presentation, but checkboxes are not values.
They're ideals. Nice-sounding, most everyone would pay lip service to, but not achievable within the constraints of the here-and-now.
I can say that I want my strategies to be design-driven, product-driven, and data-driven--- but does that mean I value them all equally?
No. Values, in my mind, are ordered lists: unlike ideals, they are grounded by priorities. Some values supersede other values, contradict existing values, or, very rarely, are equal in importance and can co-exist.
Do I want to be parent-friendly or do I want people to be available at all hours of the day?
Do I want a close-knit-family-culture or do I want people to treat it as a 9-5?
As a certain maligned CEO has said[1], to build company values you need to ask first and foremost "What is your company willing to give up?"
Once the answer has been established , then the particular wording of questions for your interviews will matter.
The questions are written in a way to tease these values apart. It's so easy to say you are [thing], but do you actually translate those values into daily routines, practices, and operations?
The team profiles on Key Values (www.keyvalues.com) are precisely what you just described. Teams self-select their top 8 values and are forced to rank them. Limiting their selections is a way for them to implicitly say/admit what they are not, and then they are asked to qualify their selections in their profiles. How convincing / genuine / accurate / sincere they are depends on the reader.
I would even say they are not values, they're slogans. I'm puzzled by the overwhelmingly positive reception this site gets. These are not things I'm interested about. I don't speak corpospeak. I mean...
Friends outside work
This is farce. The only way to have friendship with with your team members is to leave the job - or the person you like leaves the job. There's inherent conflict of interest. Never underestimate the lengths people are willing to go to get more money or social status at your expense.
Bonded by love of product
Love of product ? What's that ? Packaging fetish ? I could understand solving problems you care about personally. Solving problems that are fun to solve. But to love product ?
Has good beer
Shortcut to obesity and death to grey matter.
Rapidly growing team
Why is that an advantage ? Maybe if you're looking for a position as a recruiter / HR specialist. It can disguise high employee rotation.
Promotes from Within, Wears Many Hats, Internal Mobility, EQ > IQ, Heavily Team Oriented, Engages with Community... I have no clue what these are about.
the #1 question you should ask in an interview is, how many people have left the team or the company in the last year as a percentage of the whole. That will tell you about the retention. In my many years of experience, I've noticed that people tend to stay at companies they like. If a company is loosing more people, it reflects quite poorly on the company.
There's a flipside to that. I work at a place where turnover is extremely low. While it makes for a very friendly workplace, there are downsides. I've been here a year and a half and I'm still the new guy. And naturally, there's no room for advancement.
In addition, this can also mean that they'll keep people who are a net-negative to the team. I have worked in such a place. Some folks really should have been fired and it dragged down the rest of the team.
How could you say such a thing? It seems like they’d need to be doing some pretty absurd stuff that you can say they should’ve been fired with such confidence
I may be an oddball, but in over 15 years I have yet to work with such a person (as a team member at least; middle management is a different story). That includes almost ten years at ablarge defense contractor. I worked with plenty who provided little positive value, but everyone I worked with provided some.
I have absolutely worked with bad architects who dreamed up giant frameworks that had basically all the features of an operating systems. In the end, the whole project had to be scrapped. And all the other developers had to be (slowly) retrained to learn that <smart architect> was wrong about many things.
I have absolutely worked with bad individual contributors that likewise wasted other peoples' time through shoddy work or a lack of empathy for other individual contributors. Often they ended up working on infrastructure groups, but they could work anywhere.
I have also worked with egotistical engineers that liked pedantry and debate over actual work. If you wanted to get things done, you basically learned how to avoid their input before shipping.
There are lots of other examples here. I didn't even go into different kinds of net-negative managers.
Agreed and this brings up a big point. One of the most important things I have learned over the years is to look at the product. In a way, a product is like a painting and it is highly representative of the team that made it.
Is it fine art or throw away art? See how the team talks about their product. Their attention to detail and in this case how they treat their users. It tells you a lot about their values and how they, themselves, treat each other.
I think you're talking about Key Values/Culture Queries here, so let me chime in:
The team behind Key Values and Culture Queries is just me (oh hi! ) and I care tremendously about my users. Since I've been working full time for the last 6-7 months to build these incredibly valuable resources for people without charging for it, I thought it'd be okay to ask for an email address in exchange. I mean, you can always unsubscribe?
If you find my content to be high quality and interesting enough to want more of it, and you feel frustrated that you aren't getting more... why not stay in touch and let me continue delivering you high quality content? (Serious question.)
Ps. You can always spend 20 seconds going back, selecting fewer values, and seeing the results for those. I won't be mad. Pinky promise.
There's even no issue with leading me to a "give us your email and we'll send you what you want". I just feel that at this point if there was even a small link saying "I really don't want to give me email but I do want your stuff" then that retains relationship. As it stands I closed the window.
Wait. Earlier you said this was a side project ("side project marketing"), but now you say you've been working on this full-time for the last 6-7 months. Which one is it? :P
This is fantastic timing! I was just about to ask on HN about this yesterday as I've got an upcoming interview and am concerned about accessing culture. THANK YOU!
I was previously an instructor at a data science bootcamp and helped bootcamp grads get their first jobs. You’re missing questions specific to data science :), but still, this is a good resource. I'd be curious if you're looking at machine learning or statistical techniques to really maximize the value of information/recommendations...sometimes people don't realize they don't even know what they want!
I'm not a fan of the name "Culture Queries" as that harkens back to the pernicious "not a culture fit" excuse, which is a term used by folks in order to discriminate against candidates under the guise of some amorphous "culture" when really they're just too old, female, gay, or black to hire.
i like recycling the phrase. to me, culture is: how frequently devs integrate their work, pull requests vs pair programming, how frequently is work delivered, (how) are devs involved with delivery, if some server related to a project has a problem, who owns it (who helps?), what is the flow of work, how does the team improve itself, how many work hours are expected each week, etc...
Not necessarily. If I were hiring and you expressed something like that to me, I might say you're not a culture fit (with me), and it doesn't have anything to do with your age, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, because I don't even know those things about you.
"Not a culture fit" could easily mean something like "this person and I have a very fundamental (probably irreconcilable) disagreement about something important". Fundamental disagreements are probably going to result in disagreements about things that emanate somehow from the more fundamental thing.
For example, some people seem to think that when they go to work, they do so voluntarily as part of a mutually beneficial arrangement with their employer. Some people think something more like that they are forced to work and are essentially a slave. These two people will probably have disagreements about ideas that are further from the root than their idea about whether they are essentially free or slaves.
If I were looking for someone to work with, I would be looking not just for the necessary skills, but for deep compatibility. You seemed to be saying "not a culture fit" is just a way of rejecting people without seeming racist/sexist, but I think it's pretty clear that's not true.
But the example you cited is not a legitimate legal reason to dismiss a candidate in the United States. It is a philosophical belief and thus protected by the Equality Act of 2010.
I wholeheartedly disagree and do not believe you have done anything other than support my thesis.
Fundamental disagreements about something important are the very definition of political / philosophical belief.
If someone does not possess the technical skills to do the job, they can be dismissed from consideration, but "compatibility" with your preexisting beliefs is in no way a valid reason.
Could you legally disqualify me from employment because I disagree with you on this very point? No. But you seem to be saying that you would anyway.
Your original contention was that only racists/sexists/whatever-ists hide behind "not a culture fit". That wasn't true. Now you seem to want to talk about some legal point. As I said, I don't want to discuss legality, that's some other topic.
Refusing to defend your statements is not a compelling way to win an argument.
If you believe that you can dismiss a candidate because you have "fundamental disagreements" about politics you are incorrect.
My contention is not that "culture fit" is used exclusively to bar candidates because of race/sex/etc, but that it is used in that way and that it is impossible to know what culture fit even means because it means different things to different people.
To some people, such as yourself, it means something that is not a valid reason to dismiss a candidate.
If nothing else, please respond to this question: If my company does not have a dress code, but the "culture" of the place is that everyone generally dresses in button down shirts and slacks every day. Furthermore, I believe fundamentally that people work more productively when they dress nicely, by my definition of what nice is, and that there is greater team cohesion when they do so.
Then a fully qualified candidate walks into my office wearing clean, but baggy jeans, a hat with a sticker on it, tilted to the side, sneakers, and a t-shirt. He actually mentions in the interview that his style is important to him and part of what defines him.
Can I dismiss this candidate on the grounds that he is not a culture fit for my organization?
This is why formal professional culture was invented. You're there to work, not make friends or date. Coworkers are just that; coworkers. The less formal, the more social the environment, and the less inhibited, the more likely lines are to be crossed. Professionalism keeps things under control.
Very cool - I always have problems with asking interviewers questions in general. This is a unique and valuable niche imo. I'll definitely try to use this in a future interview. Enjoyed the fake questions as well - hope the newsletters have more of the same charm
Not sure if someone else has said this - one thing is that I was slightly overwhelmed at first by how many values there were to choose from. Maybe you could show the top 3-5 most popular values in each category (Daily Routines, Team Values, etc.) and let users expand the list if they want? Someone might not care for anything in Strategy, for instance, and wouldn't need to see the entire sub-list.
It's really hard for me to maintain two separate personas (which is why I have always highly valued "Friends Outside of Work") so I'll do my best to keep it as real as I can in my newsletters. Thanks for giving me a chance!
Re: too many tags, I get really mixed feedback on this. In some ways, my goal with Key Values is to expose people to the diversity of engineering cultures that exist! While it may be overwhelming, it says a lot about what's out there and will hopefully provide encouragement for people and help them get excited about changing jobs (when it is otherwise a pretty dreadful experience). Woops, I'm rambling! tldr: you're right. Some day, I'll A/B test this.
Hah, that was the most striking value in the entire list to me as well
That's a good point, I got over being overwhelmed real quick once I started picking values. At that point I was more impressed at how many there were. I'm definitely aware that there are two sides to this coin
edit: wondering if you thought about eventually sharing this information to companies as well? Definitely has to be an opt-in thing for the user. Some teams within companies might differ in some key values, so knowing what a candidate prefers could lead to a more granular and accurate match. Would be valuable for a company to know - enough for them to want to pay you, possibly
I personally would use such a feature, although the privacy concerns and such might be too hairy to deal with
Well I applaud your efforts, starting a business is hard. But I see some personal politics/preferences in your prompts, this may turn some people off. I'd recommend going neutral with your questions and ideas. And if I am off base on this, so be it.
But I have to work with a wide range of people, and I have found that leaving personal things out of the business environment, and having everyone respect this, allows everyone to work together regardless of their beliefs.
But listen to your results and your audience, I am just another voice in the mix, and should be dismissed as much as the next moron.
Pairing is "extreme programming's" (XP) peer review. I'd probably replace Pairing with something that's inclusive of both Extreme approaches as well as run of the mill code reviews.
i specifically value peer review in the form of daily pair programming. i am six months into my first experience with the practice, and i currently value it much more than distributed asynchronous peer review (eg github pr)
For what it's worth, the first question it recommended to me was the first question I asked in my most recent interview. So good job picking out a question that felt relevant to me.
Entering my email gave me the error "Substitution data too large"; probably because I ticked all boxes.
{"response":{"name":"SparkPostError","errors":[{"message":"Substitution data too large","description":"Transmission-level substitution data must be less than 100000 bytes","code":"2002"}],"statusCode":422}}
Smart questions during the interview is not only the way to show your interest in a company as an applicant, but to know more about company culture and save you time for the job/team that don't resonate with your values
For this to be valuable we need company profiles with (current) answers filled in. Most preferably down to the team / division granularity as workplace quality can vary a lot between them
Ahh! That's what Key Values does (aka the main product and homepage)! I will suggest companies on the Culture Queries results page in time, but decided to launch it before adding that feature. It's validating to hear you ask for it though. Thanks!
Now I see it, cool!
- Might be worth doing something to highlight which page you're on (colored text in header bar? 'tab'-like ) for people who land on a sub-page like this?
- Might be worth adding a location filter for people that are location-sensitive?
- Also might be worth having a 'clear selection' button on all pages.
- For the Culture page, the select button is below the fold.
Some of these questions strike me as bizzare. Do I live in a bubble? Do people actually care if their workplace has good beer, or whether everyone eats together? And how can "Bonded by Love for Product" mean anything but drinking the corporate koolaid?
I work for a company that makes tools for B2B tech support. It helps to work with people that give a darn about support (really helps if they've done it themselves) to know that we're on the same page about helping our customers & users.
This is in opposition to someone (who may otherwise be a fine employee) who just wants to build React UIs, or a streaming ML backend, or whatever, and is agnostic about what they ultimately work toward.
Organizations with both types of people can work well (and a mix is probably healthy). Personally I prefer having confidence in the idea that the people with whom I work have customer pain points top-of-mind rather than the most kick-ass Spark/Cassandra/etc. cluster out there.
> I learned to code in 2015, so I’m relatively new to the engineering world. Before becoming a web developer, I worked as an operations manager for Homejoy, managing 150+ people. Before that, I was a PhD candidate in Neuroscience at UCSF.
This deeply saddens me. You were on track to make an actual contribution to human understanding, and make a comfortable living doing so, but you gave that up to make people write programs to make other people scrub toilets for less money, then you did... whatever this is.
You could have been a tenured neuroscience researcher, and contributed to our understanding of how the brain works, but you did this instead.
If you’re upset or disappointed that someone stopped doing basic research, get mad at your elected officials the NIH, and the other people running the “research enterprise”, not the poor woman who making ~35k/year while living in San Francisco and working 50+ hours a week.
I love doing research but I can easily imagine scenarios where the low salary, long hours, and abysmal job security would make it infeasible for me to continue. Ironically, fixing these problems would probably improve the overall quality of research too....
Having put in their time at UCSF, this person has most likely already made a decent contribution to the field, at the very least enabling their PI to continue their work. And who knows what they will go on to do now that they have escaped the crushing grind of academia?
I know that "crushing grind" all too well, but it looks like this person has escaped only to play the dot-com lottery, which in its current incarnation "disrupts" while generating no real value. Is underpaying maids (Homejoy) worth more than brain research?
In the strangest way, I really welcome this comment.
There's not much anyone can say to me that comes close to the confusion, guilt, and pressure I felt making the decision to leave grad school. If I can provide some context: I'm a Chinese American whose parents and older sister are all tenured academic professors (in molecular biology, theoretical physics, and neuroscience). Becoming a professor was my dream, so I was also deeply saddened when I realized I couldn't devote my life to pursuing scientific truth and discovery.
But turns out, it just isn't for me.
I was miserable in academia, and that misery felt like a betrayal to everyone I knew, loved, and respected. To make things worse, I was also good at it (https://neurotree.org/neurotree/publications.php?pid=57690&s...). When it came down to it, I felt like I was living someone else's life, and I knew that my ability to make a positive impact on the world would be severely limited by how unhappy I was.
To this day, I feel obligated to be on the side of making things better rather than worse, and want to help people in whatever way I can. And while I'm no longer developing therapies for Parkinsonian patients, I do believe that I am still helping people. Key Values at its core is about helping people evaluate their personal values, find teams that will energize them, and feel genuine happiness from spending their waking hours doing work they love with people they love.
Now I feel inspired and excited, and I feel like the work I do is incredibly rewarding. I promise you I'll be able to do more for the world because I feel this way.
Listen, I get it. It's annoying that so many people today are so privileged, and here we are complaining about all of the amazing options we have. But this is our reality. If you don't love how you spend your waking hours, it is your responsibility to exercise your privilege and figure out what will. At the end of the day, the only person who has to live with every decision you make is you. So make sure you choose wisely.
Everyone wants to make a meaningful contribution to society, but that's just too vague of a desire. Maintenance and cleaning staff are some of the most overlooked and undervalued contributors, and thanks to Homejoy, I will forever go out of my way to express my gratitude to them.
Lastly, just for the record, I was not an engineer at Homejoy. I was both a city and regional manager, and I worked very closely with the cleaning professionals who serviced the Bay Area. I guarantee there are at least 100 people in the Bay who will tell you that I was the one who taught them how to clean a toilet. I scrubbed hundreds of toilets alongside them, and several of them continue to be friends of mine.
A couple links to maybe help get over your misery.
First, here is why academia decades ago was a nicer place to be and tenure was much easier to get -- meaning when parents tell you how great is was for them, times have changed: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
Second, academia is part of a larger process that stamps out most creativity and independence in order to produce professionals who toe the line ideologically: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
Good luck with your new directions. Wish I had know this decades ago myself.
BTW, on they joys of being a professional carpet cleaner: https://web.archive.org/web/20030807105050/http://www.unconv...
"More than a few people agree the best career would be one which provides challenge, intellectual stimulation, and rewards for quality work. Many however, would be surprised to discover they can have all of those benefits and more in some of the unlikeliest of careers. Case in point: I'm a professional carpet cleaner. Some people think this is a second-rate career. I don't agree with them. Carpet cleaning gives me challenges, intellectual stimulation, and many other rewards. To prove this, permit me to walk you through one of my work days."
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, which was much better than my presumptuous comment deserved. I did my time in Academia as well, and the results were a PhD I don't use, and the skills to live cheaply on a TA/RA stipend. It's a hard road, and it's hard to fault someone for not taking it. Still, it's a shame to see so much talent going into parasitic tech jobs when they could instead be unironically "making the world a better place."
So what? Human beings aren't obligated to make "an actual contribution to human understanding." If you want neuroscience research done so much, go get your degree and make that contribution yourself.
I don't understand why you would want to shame someone for their career choices based on a short blurb on the internet.
I'll continue adding questions over time, so feel free to contribute some if you have any! Thanks in advance for your feedback, and I'll be around to answer any questions you might have.
Ps. This is my first attempt at side project marketing (so much fun), and I highly recommend it to other developers.
- Digging the 'don't ask' section to your answers - I'm personally of the mindset that knowing what not to do is even more important than knowing what to do. Would love to see this section for every tile, but I know that's a lot of tiles....
- having inline quotes (and sources) from big names/articles would make this feel even more credible and a little less same-y, imo. Right now it's just one point of view - but having a quote from Larry Page or whoever would make me inclined to agree even more. (Also it'd be interesting to see what names pop up where...)
- Would drop the 'I'm relatively new' in your about blurb at the top and before your twitter - doesn't add anything of value to the statements. Launching this successfully already tells me that you've jumped over most of the early hurdles to this kind of a project, so don't undersell yourself.
- Interesting thought, though I might disagree. The big names are people who haven't interviewed for a job in a really long time (in some cases, never have) and might not remember what it's like to be an applicant. I don't necessarily think you should ask questions just to impress an interviewer, you should also ask questions to get very needed answers to inform your decision.
- I really appreciate your saying this. I still feel like I need to state that up front, but I will say that my confidence has grown so much in the last 8 months.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful feedback and kind words!
You can always refresh the page. I actually removed the second CTA yesterday to help focus user attention. You probably already know this, but most people don't do what you did ;)
This comment will shed light on:
* Committed to Personal Growth
P.s. Really dig the thought and tone behind this.
I did refresh the page, which was how I found the the input field again. Yep. Given the comments here on HN, it is fairly evident not many do.
Fair enough though. I'm also very stingy with my email address. Thanks for the feedback!
How often do you open up your inspector tool to bypass annoying shit on websites?”
Clever, that made me smile :-). But I’m still not giving you my email address and I’m still annoyed you don’t show me all the results. It would be nice if there was a “no thanks” option.
Also, what exactly is your product/service? How is it monetised (or planned to be)?
Key Values helps job-seeking engineers find teams that share their values. I'm not currently charging for my service, but will likely charge a monthly subscription to companies to post their profiles (and also charge to help curate them). Down the line, it's possible I'll always take a placement fee, but not set yet.
An additional feature might be to allow posters to also select which characteristics they have and tailor it to you...per say?
Just a guess.
Very, very useful! :-)
The only negative: I'm not a huge fan of having to enter my email to see all the questions. Isn't there some other way?
More information here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...
Candidates have just had a very stressful interview, I don't want them to have to worry about choosing to impress me versus getting the information they really seek. Obviously this doesn't apply if they ask questions that reveal massive red flags (like something utterly racist or sexist) but so far that's never happened in over 70+ interviews.
To emphasize the fact that questions are for the benefit of the interviewee, if I'm interviewing someone that's foreign and I happen to speak their language, after the interview is over I close the computer and switch to their language to make it clear that we are now having a conversation and they can relax and be informal.
For example, you can't just ask your interviewer "how's the work-life balance here?" for the same reason as your interviewer isn't going to ask you "do you have a good work ethic?" -- because there's an obviously "right" answer so you're not going to get much useful information out of it. If you select that you're interested in work-life balance, this application suggests you ask something along the lines of "How responsive are people to emails/Slack over the weekends and after 6pm?" and provides a brief explanation of why you might ask that question and how it relates to your actual interest. IMO it's a great basis for a question to ask because it doesn't have an obviously "right" answer, though personally I would tweak it somewhat.
Overall this application seems very thoughtfully put together and I am impressed.
It is immediately obvious that the question is just a veiled attempt at asking about the work-life balance.
From the perspective of both the interviewee and the interviewer, I much rather prefer the more straightforward question "how's the work life balance here?", with the expectation that the interviewer is honest enough to engage in an healthy, open discussion on the topic.
It's like if I ask you "do you think you're a good person" where you have a financial incentive to justify why you're a good person and a disincentive to just why you aren't. You're going to emphasize the good points and neglect the bad points to make yourself look the best. Company recruiters are evaluated on equivalent metrics (at least indirectly) so of course they'll give you the sunshine-and-rainbows view of the business. The more direct your question, the more egregious any lie becomes, so the more likely you are to hear the truth.
I worked at a company known for over-working employees (mostly technical, non-devs, though) where the HR recruiters would always go on and on about only ever having to work 45 hours a week max during release pushes... then in orientation the (9-10 figures net worth) CEO told you that they "didn't believe in a work-life balance", and they favored a "work-life integration" instead. Those are obviously complete opposites, and a more direct question to the recruiters could have revealed that discrepancy. In fact that disgusting lie of omission turned me off from the company so much that I found a job elsewhere pretty soon thereafter.
The goal as an interviewer is not to trigger the "HR alarms" that require you to lie or spread the truth thin. If you ask a quantifiable question like "how often do people work over 40 hours?" you're more likely to get a truly revealing answer.
To me, it's a specific way to measure work life balance. Most HR departments love to preach work life balance, but if the entire team is expected to be responsive during off hours then you have a problem. When asked "how's your work life balance?" it's easy to answer "good" without much reflection. Asking specifics helps get to the reality quicker and is more likely to get specific details.
For less experienced interviewees it may be vital to provide an example or boundary. Maybe the interviewee doesn't know how to respond to a reply of, "Yes, we have good work life balance." Even if the interviewee asked for elaboration on why it's good, that can give a perfect stage for the interviewer to say what wants to be heard instead of providing specific examples (i don't mean to say this is always malicious behavior, though sadly I'm sure that happens too).
However I make note of it for two cases. A) when they seem to be trying to ask the 'right questions; especially when they dominate the direction of the interview and we don't have enough time for my technical question. B) when they're asking questions that seem to indicate a preference for process that isn't a good fit for what we do: it doesn't affect my decision, but it may affect theirs, so I'll want to check that it came up with other interviewers and ensure that it's something the candidate is aware of if we give them an offer. Testing and deployment can be a big part of a job, and if you have strong opinions, you may not want to work somewhere that does things 'wrong'
They're ideals. Nice-sounding, most everyone would pay lip service to, but not achievable within the constraints of the here-and-now.
I can say that I want my strategies to be design-driven, product-driven, and data-driven--- but does that mean I value them all equally?
No. Values, in my mind, are ordered lists: unlike ideals, they are grounded by priorities. Some values supersede other values, contradict existing values, or, very rarely, are equal in importance and can co-exist.
Do I want to be parent-friendly or do I want people to be available at all hours of the day?
Do I want a close-knit-family-culture or do I want people to treat it as a 9-5?
As a certain maligned CEO has said[1], to build company values you need to ask first and foremost "What is your company willing to give up?"
Once the answer has been established , then the particular wording of questions for your interviews will matter.
But not before.
[1] https://qz.com/1066756/mark-zuckerberg-explains-how-to-write...
The team profiles on Key Values (www.keyvalues.com) are precisely what you just described. Teams self-select their top 8 values and are forced to rank them. Limiting their selections is a way for them to implicitly say/admit what they are not, and then they are asked to qualify their selections in their profiles. How convincing / genuine / accurate / sincere they are depends on the reader.
Friends outside work This is farce. The only way to have friendship with with your team members is to leave the job - or the person you like leaves the job. There's inherent conflict of interest. Never underestimate the lengths people are willing to go to get more money or social status at your expense.
Bonded by love of product Love of product ? What's that ? Packaging fetish ? I could understand solving problems you care about personally. Solving problems that are fun to solve. But to love product ?
Has good beer Shortcut to obesity and death to grey matter.
Rapidly growing team Why is that an advantage ? Maybe if you're looking for a position as a recruiter / HR specialist. It can disguise high employee rotation.
Promotes from Within, Wears Many Hats, Internal Mobility, EQ > IQ, Heavily Team Oriented, Engages with Community... I have no clue what these are about.
No, the team would just have to be more productive if the should-have-been-fired people stayed home and offline on any given day.
I have absolutely worked with bad architects who dreamed up giant frameworks that had basically all the features of an operating systems. In the end, the whole project had to be scrapped. And all the other developers had to be (slowly) retrained to learn that <smart architect> was wrong about many things.
I have absolutely worked with bad individual contributors that likewise wasted other peoples' time through shoddy work or a lack of empathy for other individual contributors. Often they ended up working on infrastructure groups, but they could work anywhere.
I have also worked with egotistical engineers that liked pedantry and debate over actual work. If you wanted to get things done, you basically learned how to avoid their input before shipping.
There are lots of other examples here. I didn't even go into different kinds of net-negative managers.
OK to try to manipulate me into it, like this does, I accept that.
But in the end if I really don't want to hand over my email address it should still let me get the thing I want.
Is it fine art or throw away art? See how the team talks about their product. Their attention to detail and in this case how they treat their users. It tells you a lot about their values and how they, themselves, treat each other.
The team behind Key Values and Culture Queries is just me (oh hi! ) and I care tremendously about my users. Since I've been working full time for the last 6-7 months to build these incredibly valuable resources for people without charging for it, I thought it'd be okay to ask for an email address in exchange. I mean, you can always unsubscribe?
If you find my content to be high quality and interesting enough to want more of it, and you feel frustrated that you aren't getting more... why not stay in touch and let me continue delivering you high quality content? (Serious question.)
Ps. You can always spend 20 seconds going back, selecting fewer values, and seeing the results for those. I won't be mad. Pinky promise.
There's even no issue with leading me to a "give us your email and we'll send you what you want". I just feel that at this point if there was even a small link saying "I really don't want to give me email but I do want your stuff" then that retains relationship. As it stands I closed the window.
Culture Queries is my side project marketing attempt for Key Values. I've been working on Culture Queries for a few weeks on and off.
Good luck! And let me know if there's any help/advice/resources I can give you.
For example, some people seem to think that when they go to work, they do so voluntarily as part of a mutually beneficial arrangement with their employer. Some people think something more like that they are forced to work and are essentially a slave. These two people will probably have disagreements about ideas that are further from the root than their idea about whether they are essentially free or slaves.
If I were looking for someone to work with, I would be looking not just for the necessary skills, but for deep compatibility. You seemed to be saying "not a culture fit" is just a way of rejecting people without seeming racist/sexist, but I think it's pretty clear that's not true.
Fundamental disagreements about something important are the very definition of political / philosophical belief.
If someone does not possess the technical skills to do the job, they can be dismissed from consideration, but "compatibility" with your preexisting beliefs is in no way a valid reason.
Could you legally disqualify me from employment because I disagree with you on this very point? No. But you seem to be saying that you would anyway.
If you believe that you can dismiss a candidate because you have "fundamental disagreements" about politics you are incorrect.
My contention is not that "culture fit" is used exclusively to bar candidates because of race/sex/etc, but that it is used in that way and that it is impossible to know what culture fit even means because it means different things to different people.
To some people, such as yourself, it means something that is not a valid reason to dismiss a candidate.
If nothing else, please respond to this question: If my company does not have a dress code, but the "culture" of the place is that everyone generally dresses in button down shirts and slacks every day. Furthermore, I believe fundamentally that people work more productively when they dress nicely, by my definition of what nice is, and that there is greater team cohesion when they do so.
Then a fully qualified candidate walks into my office wearing clean, but baggy jeans, a hat with a sticker on it, tilted to the side, sneakers, and a t-shirt. He actually mentions in the interview that his style is important to him and part of what defines him.
Can I dismiss this candidate on the grounds that he is not a culture fit for my organization?
Not sure if someone else has said this - one thing is that I was slightly overwhelmed at first by how many values there were to choose from. Maybe you could show the top 3-5 most popular values in each category (Daily Routines, Team Values, etc.) and let users expand the list if they want? Someone might not care for anything in Strategy, for instance, and wouldn't need to see the entire sub-list.
Re: too many tags, I get really mixed feedback on this. In some ways, my goal with Key Values is to expose people to the diversity of engineering cultures that exist! While it may be overwhelming, it says a lot about what's out there and will hopefully provide encouragement for people and help them get excited about changing jobs (when it is otherwise a pretty dreadful experience). Woops, I'm rambling! tldr: you're right. Some day, I'll A/B test this.
That's a good point, I got over being overwhelmed real quick once I started picking values. At that point I was more impressed at how many there were. I'm definitely aware that there are two sides to this coin
edit: wondering if you thought about eventually sharing this information to companies as well? Definitely has to be an opt-in thing for the user. Some teams within companies might differ in some key values, so knowing what a candidate prefers could lead to a more granular and accurate match. Would be valuable for a company to know - enough for them to want to pay you, possibly
I personally would use such a feature, although the privacy concerns and such might be too hairy to deal with
But I have to work with a wide range of people, and I have found that leaving personal things out of the business environment, and having everyone respect this, allows everyone to work together regardless of their beliefs.
But listen to your results and your audience, I am just another voice in the mix, and should be dismissed as much as the next moron.
Seems like some pretty high quality content
One! Because I maintain a throwaway email for this purpose. If it were to ever get out of control I'll simply delete the account. :)
Again congrats, very clean site!
This is in opposition to someone (who may otherwise be a fine employee) who just wants to build React UIs, or a streaming ML backend, or whatever, and is agnostic about what they ultimately work toward.
Organizations with both types of people can work well (and a mix is probably healthy). Personally I prefer having confidence in the idea that the people with whom I work have customer pain points top-of-mind rather than the most kick-ass Spark/Cassandra/etc. cluster out there.
This deeply saddens me. You were on track to make an actual contribution to human understanding, and make a comfortable living doing so, but you gave that up to make people write programs to make other people scrub toilets for less money, then you did... whatever this is.
You could have been a tenured neuroscience researcher, and contributed to our understanding of how the brain works, but you did this instead.
I love doing research but I can easily imagine scenarios where the low salary, long hours, and abysmal job security would make it infeasible for me to continue. Ironically, fixing these problems would probably improve the overall quality of research too....
There's not much anyone can say to me that comes close to the confusion, guilt, and pressure I felt making the decision to leave grad school. If I can provide some context: I'm a Chinese American whose parents and older sister are all tenured academic professors (in molecular biology, theoretical physics, and neuroscience). Becoming a professor was my dream, so I was also deeply saddened when I realized I couldn't devote my life to pursuing scientific truth and discovery.
But turns out, it just isn't for me.
I was miserable in academia, and that misery felt like a betrayal to everyone I knew, loved, and respected. To make things worse, I was also good at it (https://neurotree.org/neurotree/publications.php?pid=57690&s...). When it came down to it, I felt like I was living someone else's life, and I knew that my ability to make a positive impact on the world would be severely limited by how unhappy I was.
To this day, I feel obligated to be on the side of making things better rather than worse, and want to help people in whatever way I can. And while I'm no longer developing therapies for Parkinsonian patients, I do believe that I am still helping people. Key Values at its core is about helping people evaluate their personal values, find teams that will energize them, and feel genuine happiness from spending their waking hours doing work they love with people they love.
Now I feel inspired and excited, and I feel like the work I do is incredibly rewarding. I promise you I'll be able to do more for the world because I feel this way.
Listen, I get it. It's annoying that so many people today are so privileged, and here we are complaining about all of the amazing options we have. But this is our reality. If you don't love how you spend your waking hours, it is your responsibility to exercise your privilege and figure out what will. At the end of the day, the only person who has to live with every decision you make is you. So make sure you choose wisely.
Everyone wants to make a meaningful contribution to society, but that's just too vague of a desire. Maintenance and cleaning staff are some of the most overlooked and undervalued contributors, and thanks to Homejoy, I will forever go out of my way to express my gratitude to them.
Lastly, just for the record, I was not an engineer at Homejoy. I was both a city and regional manager, and I worked very closely with the cleaning professionals who serviced the Bay Area. I guarantee there are at least 100 people in the Bay who will tell you that I was the one who taught them how to clean a toilet. I scrubbed hundreds of toilets alongside them, and several of them continue to be friends of mine.
First, here is why academia decades ago was a nicer place to be and tenure was much easier to get -- meaning when parents tell you how great is was for them, times have changed: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
Second, academia is part of a larger process that stamps out most creativity and independence in order to produce professionals who toe the line ideologically: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
Of course, that process starts much earlier than PhD programs: https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanE...
Good luck with your new directions. Wish I had know this decades ago myself.
BTW, on they joys of being a professional carpet cleaner: https://web.archive.org/web/20030807105050/http://www.unconv... "More than a few people agree the best career would be one which provides challenge, intellectual stimulation, and rewards for quality work. Many however, would be surprised to discover they can have all of those benefits and more in some of the unlikeliest of careers. Case in point: I'm a professional carpet cleaner. Some people think this is a second-rate career. I don't agree with them. Carpet cleaning gives me challenges, intellectual stimulation, and many other rewards. To prove this, permit me to walk you through one of my work days."
Thank you for sharing these :D
I don't understand why you would want to shame someone for their career choices based on a short blurb on the internet.