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Comment by lynnetye | Hacker News Reader

If you're a software engineer (or will work closely w/ engineers), I built Key Values (https://www.keyvalues.com) to help w/ this.

Before building KV though, my research process included looking for and reading:

- the company's career and about us pages

- an active blog w/ recent posts (w/in the last 2 months)

- LinkedIn / Twitter / GitHub of founders and existing team members (I'd also look for any old blogs written by (or press written about) these folks before they joined the company)

- checking to see if the company hosts meetups or hackathons I can attend

- seeing if I know anyone who currently works there or worked there before and then reaching out

- cold emailing or Tweeting current team members

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Nice idea, but I'm very confused what I'm doing or how it works - it starts with non-zero matches, and then for each thing I click it _increases_ the number of matches...

I'd expect it to start large, and then filter down with more things selected. But it's not even like it's acting the other way, including only companies that match at least one thing I clicked, because it started non-zero.

I'm using OR logic until I have enough companies for AND logic to provide a good user experience. I'm looking forward for that day to come, too, trust me!

If you select multiple values, the results will be ordered by number of matches and prioritize the companies who ranked those values highest.

OR is fine (hopefully the sort order is by most matches first though?) - what's confusing to me is that it starts on a non-zero number. Is that the number of companies that don't match anything? Is there any value in listing them at all, if that's the case?

Highest number of matches and the ranking of those matches. For example, if you select values A and B, a company that lists A as #1 and B as #2 will show up before a company that lists A as #7 and B as #8.

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by it starting on a non-zero number. Perhaps you have one of the tags selected?

This site looks nice but a question and couple suggestions for you.

Question: why not include a "high compensation"/"high equity"/"top of market comp"/etc category? Talk about culture and values is nice but as far as I'm concerned the best way for companies to show they care about engineers is to put their money where their mouth is. There's surely a subset of engineers and companies that agree with me on this. It would be useful for matching.

Suggestions: if you're not doing this already, you should limit the number of categories a company or user can select. (And if you are doing this, you should make it clear on the site.) This will help get more meaningful results. Some of the current categories are meaningless - ie. "Impressive team members" ... what company would not claim this? It's only meaningful if you restrict them to, say, 5 categories. Either do this or just eliminate these categories and keep it on pure culture traits like "eats lunch together."

In reverse order:

2. Yup! Companies are limited to choosing 8 values. They're also forced to rank them in order of importance. As you can see, not all companies select Impressive Team Members.

1. Pretty much every other job board / recruiting tool out there filters on compensation. If you're optimizing for comp, you have plenty of places to go! However, there's no place to discover companies that share your values. There's no place to learn about the team or what your day-to-day might look like before jumping through all of the other hoops (cover letters, apps, take-home tests, whiteboarding questions...). Not until Key Values that is. This is the space I'm working to fill.

Additionally, I'd argue that constraining your job search based on comp is a mistake. After some level of $$$, an additional $10k-$20k/year means a lot less than everything else. Value alignment (aka your happiness) is worth so much more.

As a not-so-extreme example: you couldn't pay me a $300k/year to work w/ people I hated.

Oh, and depending on the company and their product/service, I'd also look at their other social media accounts. For example, some have active Instagram and/or YouTube accounts which can be incredibly insightful.

Ps. One lesson I've learned: never judge a company based on their marketing website.

Have you considered adding parameters to the end of the url so selections can be saved and shared?

Thanks for building this! I will definitely use your site when scouting for my next role.

Lynne, KV is a great tool! Thanks a lot for that. If you find time, would love to see -ve metrics as well. That would cover both aspects of a job search: what am I looking for, and what am I looking to avoid.

Maybe I missed the feature but is there a way to search for companies by name over than `crtl+f`? Not a huge deal but might be nice if you researching a potential job found on another site.

Not yet, but I will! There are a lot of features to add once there are more companies on the site. As a team of one, it's all about #prioritization :P

I found it a bit strange that adding more criteria, it matches more companies. What kind of method do you use for filtering?

It would be great if you could filter for the lack of (or the opposite of) some value... e.g. flat organization.

Key Values is a very cool idea! Have you thought about adding a location filter?

Yes of course! It'll happen once there are more companies on the site. For now, Ctrl + F works great on the homepage :P

bookmarked. Will use in the future. I love the simplistic UX.

Really cool website - thank you!

how do you determine the key values for each company?

There are 45 values to choose from and teams select (and rank) the 8 that best describe their engineering culture. I then work closely w/ them to qualify them (aka cut the fluff, answer tough questions, and "prove" it).

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