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> 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.

You have technical debt. It, by definition, slows down feature development by its very existence. But only of code that touches it in some manner.

I understand the imporantance of balancing business needs with 'clean code' but I think you're setting yourself up for unexpected costs with the mindset that code can only be cleaned up if features can still be delivered at the same speed. Are you doing it by fixing in the natural lulls in development? Hiring more people? Or perhaps by going beyond a 9-5?

I am a firm believer that saying what you are not can be more informative than saying what you are. So yes, the option to "negate" values is on the roadmap :)

Re: ambiguous "value tags", they're up for interpretation. I encourage you (and others) to read how different teams describe the same value and what it means to them. Also, there are several teams who didn't choose Creative + Innovative, Customer Comes First, and/or High Quality Codebase.

No company will "advertise" that they do not produce high quality, but we still learn something when high quality code isn't included in a team's top values. This is the beauty of limiting teams to 8 values :)

Good points!

> 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?

It's an issue with mandatory fun time. I can totally see myself enjoying my time at a pub with some colleagues, but throw in the whole team plus managers/leaders and it's just four more hours of unwanted social interaction and work talk for which to survive the only focus become getting drunk as fast as possible to cut the losses.

Definitely an issue in other industries (see e.g. law), but not in all industries.

I think what is often missed with values, is the "anti values". Often when I see a list of company values, it looks as if they can have their cake and eat it too. They are not explicit about the trade offs being made; e.g. "more perks (e.g. beer), lower salary". I think if it's hard to find one of these opposing anti-values, then it's not really an interesting choice to make, i.e. at worst it's probably a nice to have.

Last time we discussed our values at work, we thought about what we were trading off and this helped us decide whether they really were important to us.

That's an excellent perspective that I hadn't thought of before. How would you go about doing that? More beer doesn't necessarily correlate to lower salaries -- you might be trading off inclusiveness or safe work environment instead. Or if you have a flat organization that doesn't necessarily mean you have fewer meetings or more autonomy. How do you correlate a value with its anti-value? Or do you just say "We value these things, but we explicitly don't value these things"?

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

I think they can mitigate this by making the companies pick a limited number of "most important values". That way they're incentivized to make sure they mention all the things they're actually valuing, and leave out things that they don't actively prioritize (so you may think you have a high quality codebase, but if it isn't in the top 3-4 things you'd mention to a candidate, it's not a value of yours necessarily)

The author mentions in a sibling comment that companies are limited to 8 values.

In fact things like - got beer, free food (it should be food is available, you can eat here or eat outside; I would rather want to get paid for that and have a choice), TT table, foosball etc are traps.

I wish I could find a similar list (that can be trusted to some extent) for my country (India) and all I would be looking for is - work-life balance.

I don't want to drink alcohol in office (if at all I am into alcohol). Instead of playing TT in office I would like to go for a swim, or a game of badminton, or a quite evening stroll.

To get me to play TT or foosball, they'd have to be in another location where no work is allowed to happen or even be discussed.

Bharatiya high five! I know exactly what you mean by the highest value being work-life balance. Please message me as well if you do find a place respectful to employees!

It's a little bit hard to capture in a survey, but the reality is you can't value everything. Values aren't a list of all the things you think are good, it's a list of the things you value "above replacement".

Even just talking about what values your company has is very instructive and revealing. Sure, few people say "we don't value maintainable code", but if you're putting together a list of your four or five core values and you're coming up with things like "speed of execution", "rapid iteration" and you don't put anything about mainainability, the reality is you don't value that.

You might not object to it, but it just isn't important to you - you don't value it.

Good point. I don't value flat organizations, but that doesn't mean my company has a hierarchy. You're definitely right.

This isn't related to the website but I also share the same sentiment towards alcohol in the workplace. It is amazing how a beverage can change an employees outlook on a company. On the company side though, it's an easy/inexpensive way to build culture.

People are strange.

It's also a way to isolate team members who don't drink. You may think it's an "easy" way to build a team and yes perhaps that does hold true for some groups but overall, this attitude that having pseudorandom happy hours (in my opinion) flawed and is opposite of the current PC movement in the industry.

I wonder if it would be some consolation if they provided non-alcoholic tasty mocktails as well.

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).

The value is called "bonded by love of product" not "Employees use product". I'm not really convinced that's what it means.

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.