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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Twilio is a company that impresses me.

These value statement things, though, don't; in fact, I associate them with the opposite kinds of companies as Twilio.

I'm prepared to learn that this is irrational. Has anyone here worked at a company where the team was improved by a formal statement of values?

I always thought, if we were going to have a list of values, it'd be constrained to values that were head-scratching tradeoffs. "Time to market > quality", or things like that. Which of these values express competition between ideals? What company wouldn't have a "no shenanigans" value? I might be more fascinated by one that had (and justified) a "shenanigans always!" value.

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Reminds me of Stewart Lee's standup bit on "the values of the Carphone Warehouse" (a British mobile phone retailer):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwH1fLEMDkY

Thanks for posting this. Seriously funny.

Thomas, have you seen Netflix' memo about their values and corporate culture? I think it does fit in your description.

Since I'm not an insider I have no opinion on whether their team is improved by it, but I believe it does the job of attracting people they want to work with and filtering out people they don't want.

I'm not sure about a small company, but a couple of years back we did an organization-wide values exercise at Engineers Without Borders Canada. As a highly distributed organization with chapters across the country and staff across Africa as well, having a stated set of values that resonated extremely well with me and many other members and staff was very useful. It's a great foundation to build upon especially as the organization continues to grow.

You can check them out here: http://wiki.ewb.ca/en/EWBs_Values_and_Beliefs

37signals got its name from 37 ideas they had about how a company should be.

http://37signals.com/00.html

If you actually read this, you'll quickly see that it is not a list of 37 "values", but rather a clever way of structuring the company's "about" page; for instance, "08" is a list of their clients.

No that's not actually true. That link was just the first from here: http://37signals.com/manifesto And #8 is meant to demonstrate that they have very large and important clients, proving their "experience", which is the title of that section.

Yeah 1 or 2 values make sense, 9 do not. Twilio appears to have more values than Apple has products.

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