Show HN: Culture Queries – The best questions to ask during your job interview

- 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.

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)?

Very, very useful! :-)

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.

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'

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.

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.

Good luck! And let me know if there's any help/advice/resources I can give you.

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.

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 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.

I don't understand why you would want to shame someone for their career choices based on a short blurb on the internet.