Key Values – Find Engineering Teams That Share Your Values

Is there an explicit filter for negation? "Want / Don't want / Don't care", as opposed to just "Want / Don't care".

Flat hierarchies: Chaotic leadership / implicit and unwritten hierarchies with CEO's favorites.

Values diversity: Politicised office focusing on SJW issues and quotas, not diversity.

Fosters psychological safety: Empowers toxic characters to bring their drama into work.

Empirically, from the limited placements I have seen, the more a workplace outwardly focuses on one of these aspects, the more they are ridden by toxic tribalism/outrage culture.

You might find more of what you’re looking for here:

https://www.keyvalues.com/finding-worklife-balance-in-tech

4-day work week, 6 weeks off is within negotiable distance in Switzerland (from personal experience - have worked 4day/5weeks before).

The extra 1-2 weeks PTO (on top of the legally mandated 4) are typical for larger enterprises such as governmental work or the postal system.

It seems to be self-reported by the startup and curated by the Key:Values staff.

As you can imagine, there are subcultures within an organization and just because all of the parents on the marketing team take advantage of paid family leave doesn’t mean the parents on the engineering team do. If I were say a 30yo woman planning to have my first child in the near future, I’d like to know if there were any parents on the eng team I was about to join.

Similarly, open communication on sales probably looks pretty different than it does for devs.

The values are from the perspective of an engineer evaluating different employment opportunities. What would you or I want for our day-to-day and from our future teammates?

This would allow to assess the truthfulness of such claims

Companies are limited to choosing 8 values and they’re also asked to rank them in order of importance. You’ll notice that many teams don’t select “Impressive Team Members.”

One of previous companies had this as a value. It was a startup, 5 engineers and the VP. You were expected to give honest critical feedback as well as positive, and were expected to receive both critical and positive feedback. It actually worked really well. There wasn't any politics, just people trying to become better engineers and deliver a quality product.

Over a couple years we grew to 15-20 engineers, and devolved in to people writing multi-page emails to the VP, criticizing their colleagues (minor, or hard-to-measure things like "they don't refactor enough", or "they're happy writing poor quality code". Colleagues found out, and weren't happy a pier went behind they're back to criticize them to their manager. The VP didn't do anything, "Open Communication" was a core value, how can communicating problems be bad?

Moral of the story is, even when a company has a good value, it still doesn't really tell you anything about them. All it takes one person to abuse it for their own gain, and a manager who can tell the difference, and it all falls apart.