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Comment by lynnetye | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Did you find my easter egg?!

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 ;)

CSS-Mastery FTW.

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.

I found the easter egg! Hilarious way to handle the quora-like "subscribe for more", and actually got me to subscribe. I won't spoil it for others.

I've been trying really hard to put myself in the shoes of the user. This is exactly what I would have done, so there you have it.

Ha, I considered it, but didn't bother until I read this comment thread. Then I knew exactly what I had to do. Enjoyed.

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.

This comment will shed light on:

* Committed to Personal Growth

That was hilarious. You, I like you.

I subscribed right away. But maybe we should still be friends?

You know where to find me!

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.

P.s. Really dig the thought and tone behind this.

Awesome ;) I subscribed because of it :D

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.

That is a great idea. To go one step further, it would be cool if those suggestions had budget tears. Because every implementation has some cost.

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...

I selected an option from. Each section and hit the button - nothing happens? I'm on Android if it makes any difference.

Also, what exactly is your product/service? How is it monetised (or planned to be)?

From the looks of it, when you give you email they're adding you to a job posting list... (main monetization scheme)

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.

Per se. Latin.

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.

I found myself wishing for other options. At least in the start you could allow users to enter other answers, so that you can learn them...

Hey, Lynne - I finally had a few minutes to check out your site and I really really like it… Thank you for putting it together!

Very, very useful! :-)

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