What Hacker News readers want in a job | Hacker News Reader

What Hacker News readers want in a job

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92 pointslynnetye75 comments

Well there are more things which, given the experience, I don't want: corporate bollocks, high discipline competitive working environment, being underpaid/overworked, working in low cost/outsourcing center, insufficient hardware, strict development environment fixated on validation, windows machine with antivirus eating most resources, bloated backend running locally and eating up the remaining resources, pushing and manipulation understood as "teamwork", managers worrying about their cozy position and not seeing or not wanting to see through this "teamwork", begging or even asking for holidays, with the time diluting number of experts and increasing number of those lazy and incurious. Otherwise I'm open minded like a 18 years old virgin.

> strict development environment fixated on validation

I've spent some time working with ill-defined scenarios/flows so having validation doesn't look to be something bad to me. Although I had never worked in an environment that could be said to be fixated on it, so I guess I'm missing something.

So I wonder... what's bad about this? (Or I misunderstood what this is about?)

I meant mostly which activities trigger running the tests of the project locally and on the CI server. Local build, git hooks, push to remote? Does CI validate all remote branches, is it possible to disable running tests on a particular branch? Given an overzealous quality evangelist in the team, there are too many ways to paralyze the workflow of those preferring to have space to move and air to breathe. Configuration of tools like JSHint can easily go too far as well.

Hmm. We use Phabricator, and while you're free to skip unit tests and linters locally (on by default, but can be skipped) or ignore Jenkins build failures as you iterate over a diff, the expectation is that you get all the tests and linters to pass before landing to master (and usually before soliciting reviewers).

I've worked in places where the friction and overhead caused by the validation and QA process caused more damage than the issues they were trying to solve. As in most things, you need a balance.

Maybe it is just me (and being not a programmer or software engineer it is perfectly OK to ignore this note), but it is not like there is a "wide" representation of more "practical values".

I mean (just examples of less "idealistic" values):

1) Job is paid an awful amount of money

2) Relocation is fully reimbursed

3) Full health assistance provided

or even:

4) No open space, you will have a real office

might be - I believe - more selected than "Has good beer".

agree. Also many of those things are open to interpretation. What does product-driven and design-driven mean and how are they different? Work/Life balance seems ambiguous as well. Balanced in what way? team is diverse? diverse in what way, height, weight, grammar skills, gender, musical interests, etc?

They're definitely open to interpretation. It's really interesting to see how different teams define the same value.

Diversity is a great example. I'm happy to see "Team is Diverse" ranked so highly across the different segments. While it's easy to confuse gender diversity as being true diversity I think people are talking more and more about intersectionality and diversity across race, age, sexual orientation, education, work experience, and also interests. We don't know what people are thinking of when they select "Team is Diverse," but a desire for more diversity of any kind is definitely a good thing.

Why is desire for more diversity a good thing? Most people don't ever explain this part, or is it just because it is the politically correct thing to do?

My experience with "greater diversity" is usually shoehorning people who generally don't care into positions purely because of the color of their skin or gender. Is this secretly a codeword for "bring more females, tech is a sausagefest"?

I am so surprised that not more people want a real office.

I don't mind sharing an office with 1-3 other people to save real estate but come on this whole sit down in the middle of the open floor and code is garbage.

We all thought that the Crimson Permanent Assurance offices were fiction: https://vimeo.com/111458975

LOL They used to cram a bunch of them into a room. There was also a secretarial pool which wasn't just a pool of typist who'd be sent out to an office, but was a giant room full of people pounding on noisy typewriters.

That was the standard for jobs like that. It also took a lot more manpower to do stuff like that. So, they crammed them all into a room and let them have at it.

I suspect a lot of people have given up on finding somewhere with real offices and now only look for remote work.

Agreed. I found myself ticking just two boxes: Remote Work and Continuous Integration.

I'd almost exclude a company for mentioning some of these values.

"Ideal for Parents"? I'm a parent and I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. Generous vacation time and flexible hours are generally appreciated by everyone. Seems weird to sort of single out people with children as if we're "special needs" or something.

"Supports physical wellness" can end up really pushy. I've seen this in companies that self-insure especially. Maybe I just want to eat a cheeseburger for lunch and not take the company sponsored cholesterol test, ya know? No, I don't care that you're "hoping for 100% participation".

Eats lunch together, friends outside of work, has good beer... Eh... Mixing friends/coworkers hasn't turned out well for me in the past. I prefer work to stay work. I've got nothing against having a beer while talking about work, but I really like to keep my personal life out of the office.

Psychological safety, active inclusion, safe to fail... I'm scared to comment on why I would avoid these "features", which I suppose says enough about it anyway.

Don't get me wrong -- It's an awesome website and a fantastic idea. It's just not at all for me. I guess I'm much more of a "mercenary" than a "missionary". :)

You've put this better than I ever could have.

> "Ideal for Parents"?

Hum, like in the sense of: "I want to pass more time with my kids" or like in "I want to hide from my kids as many time as humanely possible"?

Ideal for parents = remote work without being strictly bound to specific hours. That's the only way I can see it being ideal

There is a reason for this. This is a true representation of what HN readers want. Rather:

> I curated this values list after interviewing dozens of engineers who identify themselves as missionaries, not mercenaries. They believe that team culture and the people they work with are as important as (if not more important than) compensation or company reputation.

That being said, I believe the first 3 on your list are probably assumed by those answering. "Of course they will be paid a lot, of course relocation assistance is provided (if not WFH capabilities), and of course health insurance! Those should go without saying..."

Though, they should be said because it's the truth.

For the last 10 years it was all about learning and sometimes the company mission.

Now I'm turning 30 so it's mostly about money. Present money or future money.

When someone tells me "think of all you can learn!" When trying to sell me on a project / job I always say, "as long as it comes with an ever growing pay check"

To me it's just a way "the man" tries to keep us underpaid. Interesting work or experience is not a substitute for money. In truth, the more learning required, the more stress (typically) and thus, the more money I'd like for my services.

Amen brother. $$$ what matters the rest is just pretty words.

I'd love to ask you the same question as I did above: what is your strategy in getting the highest paying job? Do you freelance? Have side hustles? Change jobs frequently? Spend time mastering negotiations?

Interesting. I don't think you being 30 makes it mostly about money. There probably is some other factor than your age.

I'm 32 and for me it's about work-life balance and high quality codebase - apparently that makes me very average.

I guess it depends on where the OP is from? People from US and developed EU countries already have at least decent salary so they focus on things higher up in the hierarchy of needs, people from countries where outsourcing/low cost centers dominate say "it's all about money" but they simply mean "at least a decent salary":)

I'm turning 50 and most of the list is nonsense.

These values are certainly not important to everyone. In fact, many people don't use any of these to evaluate jobs/offers. I'm curious though, what do you care about most and how do you compare options and choose the right one based on what you care about most? Ie. if you care about money, do you change jobs frequently in order to negotiate a better salary?

That’s right. They can take away the stuff the culture depends on, they can take away the workplace you feel so secure in, but the compensation is written into the contract. Plus that’s the actual reason why we all get up in the morning and do this shit.

If you don't mind me asking, what strategy do you use to find jobs? Is salary more important to you than equity? Or do you also value benefits/perks? (Ps. I'm the author of this article and am just curious about what exactly motivates you.)

Is money the main driver? If so, do you do freelance work or do you always seek full-time employment? Thanks in advance :)

I’m just always trying to find somewhere that’s better. If I can make a better salary and get a better job, great. If I can make the same salary but get more equity, in a company that seems likely to be successful, great. (I’m doing that last one now.)

It’s not much of a strategy, just realize that loyalty is a mugs game and none of these places actually care about an individual employee, so neither should you care about them.

I don’t freelance because I know I would hate all the non-technical parts of the job, and I don’t have much of a network because people drive me crazy so it would be hard to get work in the door. The idea appeals to me though, in the sense of working a job for a while and then not working for a while.

The older I get the less it is about money, because life is short, and money starts losing its power to buy happiness quickly once you pass a threshold which is very easy to reach as an experienced software developer. A job which pays a lot of money can also make you miserable, comprehensively so, to such a degree that there is nothing you can spend that extra money on which will make up for it. In my experience the jobs which have paid the most did so because they had to, because nobody would put up with them otherwise; so "best salary in the industry" has become a negative signal.

I'm turning 30 soon too. What I care about and look for in a job has changed over the years (and my guess, will continue to change).

I was all about the company mission, working somewhere that was growing quickly, and getting hands-on experience. After I burned out a bit, I looked for work/life balance and was focused on making and saving money. After a couple of years, I missed the excitement, passion, and long hours. While I'm definitely hoping to turn Key Values into a revenue-generating business (ie. money is on my mind), I'm really motivated by challenging myself with something new, learning, and this mission to help match companies and job-seekers.

But trust me, for the previous 2 years, I was mostly about the money too. (Maybe 60% money, 40% learning the skills to try and start a business of my own.) If I hadn't made money a priority, I wouldn't have been able to do what I'm doing now.

"United States choose 'Promotes from Within' more than readers from anywhere else."

Can only speak for myself as an Australian, but i initially took this as some kind of "Anthony Robbins" type bullshit motivational phrase or american corporate marketing nonsense statement.

Now that i pause and ask myself to reframe it, presumably in its intended form, my second natural response is "well, where else would they promote from?", thus making it a truism.

Only when i pause even longer would I consider it as asking about the phenomenon of needing to job-hop to get ahead.

But in short, i don't think the phrase captures a universal intended meaning very well :)

The longer I work, the more "High Quality Code Base" matters to me.

Maybe after you've had enough of working on so much others' shit, not much else matters.

If you are like me, don't forget to review that code that the moron that was you (or me) wrote 10 years ago. :)

I've spent too many hours of my life improving code. Then come to find out my improvements were worthless because of some insane externality that I would have never considered.

For example, I just spent a week improving the loading speed of this data processing engine from like 1.5MB/s to over a GB/s (using an artificial benchmark that I wrote). I put things into certification and saw the loading speeds were only like 2.0MB/s. After some investigating, I discovered I was hitting the limit of the system that was serving the data.

I would have never thought that, in 2017, there would be systems in place that couldn't serve a single file faster than 2.0MB/s.

- Zero egos & cut throat B.S.

- Camaraderie

- Kindness

- Respect

- Fair market salary with raises that match what recruiters offer daily

In other words: "Our incredible journey"

What do you mean by "zero egos?"

Interesting that High Employee Retention is so high for the US (#4) but the only country with it in the top 10 is India (#10). As an engineer who has recently moved from the US to the UK, I'm just getting used to these cultural differences and I think mature tech locations (US) are able to understand the importance of employee retention toward an individuals fulfillment in the job. A deeper dive into the statistics would be insightful for comparing countries. Specifically, looking at the values that are uniquely high or low for a location.

I look forward to collecting more data and will definitely share them once I do.

The US, despite being more "tech mature" than other countries, still fails to provide work/life balance or maintain quality code. I was honestly surprised to see these two things at the top of every list. It seems obvious that companies would prioritize these two things, yet... they aren't the standard.

Just reading the other popular posts on HN today (ie. https://medium.com/@deusexmachina667/you-fired-your-top-tale...), it sounds like these are common stories. You can be well-respected, be incredibly experienced/knowledgable, and still be overworked and pushed to push code we're not proud of. These things lead to turnover. I wonder if the startup culture in the US ("grow as fast as you can, do whatever it takes!") is especially bad, and contributes to low retention. Probably.

That's where the fuzziness of the terms comes in, I think.

For instance, I've seen in-house codebases that drive US devs to anger about their low quality that are regular paragons of excellence compared to stuff that's come back as part of outsourced projects (and not solely offshores outsourcing), so it's all relative.

I am surprised over "eats lunch together" being so high. I dont get why would anyone care about that at all.

Personally, I value it a lot. If you want to communicate with your colleagues during the day, you have to spend more time in the office; or keep the same time spending less on actual work. Eating lunch together allows you to avoid both.

I don't like eating lunch with my coworkers but if I liked my coworkers enough to eat lunch with them I would probably love work.

See, I like my co-workers and we work together well and we go out outside of work hours for drinks and stuff, but I still like to eat lunch by myself.

I didn't vote in this poll, but it's always been important to me.

It's an easy proxy to see that your team mesh well together (if my "best friends" at work are also my team members, chances are we'll work well together). Plus we'll end up discussing work problems we all have and that lunch time can turn into solutions.

It's funny, even though "Eats Lunch Together" is really important to me, I'm also surprised to see it so high on the list.

Lunch time is an opportunity to socialize with your colleagues. It's also a great time for spontaneous collaboration to take place. I've worked at a startup where great ideas were born out of engineers, operations managers, and customer service reps eating sandwiches together. It's cross-pollination that does good for everyone.

A lot of companies also combine lunch with talks, presentations, or team building activities. In general, I care deeply about working with people that I look forward to chatting with during the day.

If you can imagine a place where most people eat alone at their desks, what else might this signal? Maybe people aren't friendly? Maybe everyone is expected to work through lunch? Maybe people are very exclusive and leave the office in group without inviting "outsiders"?

I work remote currently, but I've spent many years working in offices. In those times, as an introvert, I've greatly preferred to eat outside the office, to avoid feeling expected to socialize during what would otherwise be a nice 30-45 minute break from other people. That isn't to say I don't like other people, but it is exhausting to be continuously around people who you ought not to ignore, especially if you aren't actually interacting with them (but might be called upon to do so at any moment), and having a break most days from that makes it doable.

When I was younger, I used to often lunch with boyfriend who worked nearby. These days, I go sometimes with small group of colleagues, not always the same. I oftentimes go alone, because they prefer different place then me. I also occasionally lunch with former colleagues or with people from different departments. Some colleagues go exercises instead of lunch and then eat sandwich fast at the table - their freedom to choose so. We have very good working relationship, I respect them a lot and know they respect me and know they would tell me directly if they would have some problem with my work or me (same with long time ago). We do have personal conversations too and support each other when someone has problem at home.

The worst teams I worked in expected a lot unofficially-mandatory socialization where your status and work progress depended a lot on your ability to be charming and fun. Did not prevented bad politics.

I find places in which I get along with my coworkers enough to have lunch with them with no work talk to be the best I've been at. It's fun.

Just anecdotally, but every team I've been on where we ate lunch together was amazing, and every team where we didn't was joyless. Eating together of course doesn't cause amazing teams (but it can help), but seems to happen naturally when the team gels. I also like to invite random people from outside our team to come eat with the group, just grabbing someone in the hallway as we head out ("hey we're going to X, want to join?"), it's great for building connections in the org.

I think that you're just reversing the arrow of causality.

or even that there isn't really an arrow. i think .. all of the places which essentially had a near-mandatory eat together culture spent an awfully large amount of time organizing and executing lunch and very little time doing anything else. we got to know each other, but it didn't mean we worked* together

High pay, interesting work that makes the world better, and flexible low hours =)

Something with low hours (think: 2 days a week), no bullshit like open offices, and mininal office politics.

Of course with that first requirement I'm unemployable, so, I'll stick to teaching English and keep my dev skills for private projects.

> Eats lunch together

Is that really high up on the list when people are looking for a new job?

I'm perfectly fine working in teams and actively enjoy it for the most part, but lunchtime is my time.

I spend it reading articles I've saved for later, studying something unrelated to work, reading a book or even just going for a walk.

I like my co-workers a lot and I meet them outside work for nights out/leaving drinks etc. but I still prefer to eat by myself and take a break from everything.

I'd like to point out how some of the responses may be skewed. This is not a criticism, but worth discussing.

I would suggest that in some cases, the priority of various values has a lot to do with fears and insufficiency in recent experience, rather than the true priority given to a particular value.

Example: In the US, Promotes From Within is rated higher than other values when compared against other regions. Does this mean it really is a higher-priority value, or is this a contrast to experience for US workers? Maybe they are mentioning it more because they are experiencing it less, but that doesn't mean other things they assume/always get are not more important. I may not mention High Wages if I am used to getting paid well, but that doesn't mean I would not recognize that as a priority if I faced a situation where I might get paid a lot less.

Certainly worth discussing. I actually talk about this in my article and use "Promotes from Within" being ranked highly in the US as an example.

It is very likely that the most popular values are a combination of what we most value and lack. It's hard to know for sure. Anecdotally, I've spoken with many American developers who disagree with the way their company handles promotions. It sounds like devs are often promoted into managerial roles as a reward for technical ability, even though they don't have experience managing people. Sometimes, they aren't even particularly interested in managing people. I wonder how often this happens, and how many less-skilled developers would succeed in those roles.

Hi,

I've been a developer for a few decades, mostly in large companies (>50k employees). On the subject of promoting technical talent, I can offer some insight into how it happens and why. I studied Organization Behavior and Operations Management as I found the topics interesting. Hence, I've learned how companies interact with their employees and how some companies adjust.

First, this "issue". A person is very good at their job and withing the company - they should be promoted to recognize their continued contributions. Most companies have a Human Resources department that is designed for efficiency and 'legally provable fairness', so people are categorized into titles, grades, and rankings. Most technical career paths have a limit to their maximum grade - hence a maximum salary.

For example, some companies have grades GSR01 - GSR08 as non-managerial employees. Manager roles have ranks from GRS09 - GRS15. Above that is executive, ESR16 - ESR21. Each has a salary range which is determined by competitive salary surveys of other companies in similar industries.

The situation described above - a talented person needs to be compensated more - causes a conflict because these companies don't have a "career path" that includes non-managerial positions with higher pay (or career management requirements). A manager's work performance is determined by a number of tasks that are related to the performance of their employees. But such a list isn't available for a company without a "Technical Career Path". The result is that in order for a good employee to get a promotion, they are forced into a Managerial Career Path. A technical person is moved into a management role because the company has no other way to promote them or increase their salary.

Allow me a specific example: A person worked as a mechanic at a local muffler place. He was their best. They had 4 other guys and a front-office manager, plus an owner. When the manager quit, the top mechanic wanted they job because it paid more than the mechanic job. The owner was quite blunt: "You have years of experience working on cars and no experience running a store. I can't lose you as a mechanic and a I can't risk my only income source to a person with no experience. So I can't promote you." (Later, they negotiated a different pay scale to keep the mechanic working there. Most companies don't have that flexibility - all salaries are limited by HR rules.)

If the above example is applied to a large company - they can afford to train a manager 'on the job' - so they accept the risk and cost of doing so. And in most cases, the person is good enough at the job. However, everyone involved knows it is not a best case scenario. It only happens that way because the company doesn't have a better solution.

---

I mentioned the better solution above - the Technical Career Path. This is a structure within a company that allows the desired progression. Often it requires the employee to meet requirements beyond their day-to-day work. Some requirements may be; nationally published, provide support on other products within the company, present technical information within a larger group within the company, contribute regularly to external projects (open source), etc.

For this to happen, the company has to invest in an additional career path within their HR department and train upper and mid-level management on managing, mentoring, and guiding these employees. This is not a small undertaking. Most small to medium companies cannot afford this type of investment.

The alternative, and the result, is that technical people don't get promoted to management very often. The company recruits from outside so they don't have to bear the cost of training the new manager.

---

So, are we, technical people, 'stuck'? Is this something that can only be solved by the 'company'? No. It is something that can be addressed by each person who ranked "Promotes from Within" as high on their list. Being bluntly; for a person to get promoted, they have to be promotable. That is, they have to develop the skills the company is needing. Take a couple of night courses on Business Management, Leading Teams, and Public Speaking. Then ensure the company management knows you have these skills and want to put them to use. We technical people will happily spend a weekend building a network in our basement or learning the latest javascript library. But in order to get beyond that promotion boundary, a technical employee has to learn something other than the technical.

As a technical person, I've resigned from management jobs in order to go back to technical work. I love creating software more than I do leading people - even for less pay. When I had access to the Technical Career Path, I took it and I was happy.

thanks, jon

'legally provable fairness' is a made-up term that is intended to relate how an action by a person is driven by a company policy. Most company policy is written with the intention of being used as a defense in a legal situation relating to a complaint against the company. For example, an improper termination lawsuit or an investigation by a government agency.

It immediately jumps out at me that "Team is diverse" has such a high bar. Is this the HN/San Fransisco bubble in action?

In all of the interviews I've done as both interviewer and interviewee, not once has "diversity" been mentioned. In fact, it's so strange that it feels oddly hostile to me. It's that weird. I can't fathom asking someone who's interviewing me: "Do you have enough latinos in your team?"

Diverse doesn't even really mean diverse. It's just an excuse to make people feel like they are inclusive, at least - that's the impression I have from those I speak to in SF.

So yes, that's a mostly SF thing from my experince.

It's also interesting that I'm usually considered not diverse (white guy in tech). However, what's interesting is that when we conduct surveys at work, in conferences, school, etc. I usually stick out like a sore thumb. Because I'm from a poor income bracket, in the midwest. Where most "diverse" people get scholarships for school, because I'm white I received next to none (besides for my research / grades). So what people mean isn't really "diverse" they mean, woman and / or other skin color (not even other culture).

Diversity should include states IMO since the U.S. is easily diverse, perhaps not as much as Europe, but enough to be unique. How many people on your office have people from the Midwest or the south? It's actually rarer than I anticipated looking at the figures.

> Where most "diverse" people get scholarships for school

Most "diverse" people don't get scholarships either. These scholarships are either broad, but small (i.e., All Native American students get $500/semester) or generous but targeted (Native American Women Studying Electrical Engineering get $4000/semester). The latter can afford to be so generous because of the complete lack of candidates.

But this attitude completely ignores the silent majority of these "diverse" groups that get nothing (or are actively screwed) while being chastised by the "I'm white so I get nothing crowd."

I had several Asian friends in college that paid $40k+ a year for tuition at a shitty state school (which was $8k/yr for me). One was married to an American since his freshman year and started working a job in the US at the end of his sophomore year, yet, the university refused to give him the in-state tuition rates until his very last semester. He also graduated with a 3.9 GPA.

His parents paid roughly $150,000 for the same education that I would have paid $32k for. Had he been a white American, he would have been eligible for an automatic academic scholarship (like I was).

>Had he been a white American You mean "had he been an American citizen born in your state"? Race has nothing to do with this example. All out-of-state people regardless of color experience the same.

Out of curiosity, what's the demographic makeup of your interviewees? I can see how someone might value diversity while feeling uncomfortable raising the point.

italian, french guy, latino girl, a few white guys, a super brown brasilian guy, etc. What you're implying is laughable to me, I wouldn't ask the question to anyone, regardless of their race.

Alternatively, the question is a proxy for: Are there people that look like me? Will my opinions be heard by others?

I work at a place that's very not diverse, and the groupthink can be suffocating. It's not so much as having sufficient nonwhites on your team, it's more about having people with different ways of solving problems. In my experience, a lot of mid-level problems get solved by inviting over a low-level programmer and have them look at the problem for a bit, asking questions about it.

Having a good distribution of perspectives is much more important than having a multi-ethnic hivemind.

I can't fathom asking someone who's interviewing me: "Do you have enough latinos in your team?"

Who recommends asking this?!

I also wondered if diversity would be more important among HN/San Francisco folks! Right now, I don't have sufficient data to say either way. I actually predicted "Actively Practices Inclusion" to be selected more frequently in the Bay Area, or at least California and New York, but this doesn't seem to be the case either.

Re: interviews, you're right. It's not brought up very often. Since working on Key Values though for the last several months, I've learned that many women refuse to be the first female engineer at a company. While diversity isn't always visible, many people will simply look at the current team members and draw conclusions themselves.

"How does your company think about diversity?"

I asked this question in my most recent round and got a variety of answers, which I found illuminating. Some people were caught totally flat-footed and it wasn't a focus, others rattled off a variety of initiatives to address a variety of aspects.

Diversity focus should maybe be on diverse backgrounds not diverse skin tones. But its probably easier to do the latter as a company so that you can quickly look progressive to everyone in the industry (PR reasons, etc).

The entire "diverse" idea to be on the list is terrible.

In the company I work at (small, ~30), I didn't even notice we are extremely diverse (the skin color is mostly white, but every person comes from different countries/continents) until someone pointed out that we are.

I just considered everyone "people", that's it? It's not being diverse that is nice, it's the fact that there is no racism that is nice.

No racism = you won't notice you have different people in the team, it's just natural. That's how it should have been since the beginning.

No assholes. =)

Unfortunately they're everywhere!

Money.

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