1,824 karma · joined December 30, 2014
I never found Glassdoor super helpful during my searches, so I didn’t go that route.
You might find more of what you’re looking for here:
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.”
To answer the original question (Who decides whether they meet each of the criteria?), the answer is you, the reader. "Work/life balance" can mean any number of things, and people often forget that there are countless ways to define a given term. The goal is for teams to describe what it means to them and let interested applicants decide whether it resonates w/ them.
I struggled w/ sales for ~8 months and then (very randomly) was introduced to someone who had 12+ years of sales experience in tech. I asked if I could pay him to sit down w/ me for a couple of hours and walk through all of my sales emails and correspondences. It was SO illuminating. I've continued to pay him a generous hourly rate to keep coaching me on sales, and ~6 months later, I feel extremely confident as a technical founder who can also do sales.
Getting an expert to walk through your process w/ you is really important because there are so many nuances.
There are _many_ problems in recruiting, but three things really bothered me during my search:
1. Information asymmetry. Job seekers should know more about the people at and day-to-day practices of a company before committing to their long and exhausting interview process. Often times this information is buried under cover letters, applications, phone screens, take-home tests, and hours of onsite interviews. The amount of time/energy it takes for a job seeker to get to the most important information means that they can only really "get to know" a handful of companies.
2. Incentive misalignment. Another big problem in recruiting is having placement fees. If a recruiter's goal is to get me to join a company just long enough to hit the 90-day mark (when they get paid) but it's actually a bad fit, I lose and so does my employer. The incentives are misaligned between (third-party) recruiters, candidates, and employers when there are contingency fees.
3. Lack of exposure to options. When you don't know what your options are, it's easy to settle. It often takes people 3, 4, 5 jobs to figure out what it is they really care about and want from their employer / team / work. Unfortunately, this can take years to figure out for yourself. Not knowing what you want means that you'll do a worser job of choosing the right company to join. We would all do better if we had more exposure to the different ways different teams operate.
I ended up too frustrated w/ my job search to actually get a job. I instead founded Key Values (https://www.keyvalues.com) which solves for the three issues above and provides a way for software engineers to find teams that share their values.
The most talented and competent people will still perform poorly if they're unhappy / uninspired. That junior dev that you took a chance on will blossom if they have the right support and environment.
Value alignment is everything.
When I read the BBC article, I assumed it was something equally no budget. Little kids like weird stuff.
Ps. I love your /jobs.
Even if you don't make the mistake of bringing in a VP of Sales too early, it's easy for founders to get lost during this stage of the company.
When founders struggle to get those first paying customers, I wonder how many conclude that they haven't yet found product/market fit when really, they're just terrible at doing sales. It's especially difficult for technical founders (who tend to be bad/new at doing sales), and particularly challenging when selling B2B software.
How do we know that the current format isn't working 100x better than the previous format?
A previous version of the homepage was a personal favorite of mine (and it doesn't exist anymore!), but every change that is made to Indie Hackers was carefully and thoughtfully considered. Courtland and Channing are almost certainly making metrics-driven decisions on what to keep, iterate, or throw away. Even though previous formats were personal favorites to some (myself included), the current format/direction must be serving, engaging, and providing value to more people than before. Don't you think?
There are plenty of young software engineers who hear about first-year salaries at Google and expect similar comp packages from startups. (Are they being too greedy? Meh, they're just misinformed or need to take some time to recalibrate their expectations.)
There are also plenty of companies guilty of the same thing. Their expectations are too high as they turn away great candidates because they don't have a CS degree from a top school or have an impressive track record of open source contributions.
The OP listed "don't be greedy," which sounds familiar to me. It's easy to have a few bad experiences and then draw a blanket conclusion that every tech company is trying to squeeze me. My point is only that it's frustrating on both sides, and whether you're an applicant or a hiring manager, understanding what the process feels like to the other party will make the process that much easier for you.
In the last year though, I've met a wide variety of people with a wide variety of responsibilities, approaches, and backgrounds, yet they all share the same job title. There are certainly awful recruiters out there, but there are also some really fantastic ones! (Just like how there are both awful and fantastic devs out there.)
I've gotten to see both sides of job searching/hiring and it has been eye opening. Both sides have similar complaints of the other, which is why the process looks so darn similar to dating.
My guess is that founders, CTOs, and recruiters would all probably make a list similar to yours:
- Actually try to get to know and understand our company
- Don't use fill-in templates
- Have some actual knowledge of our industry/product
- Don't focus on positions you worked on 10 years ago during college
- Don't be greedy
Feel free to reach out to me by email if you think I can offer more specific advice/help/resources.
Too many people are playing a numbers game, which creates a lot of noise. The noise makes it easy to miss good connections.
Inexperienced people (on both sides) are looking for the wrong things and just like it is w/ love, a lot of us need to learn the hard way. Wanting to date the most popular guy/girl in school is the equivalent of wanting to work at a "company everyone knows."
A few years later, we want to meet someone who is "ambitious, interesting, and has a good sense of humor," which is maybe like wanting to work at a company in an industry you can get behind. It's less superficial, and we have some direction here, but it's still too vague. (A lot of people are drawn to health and education not because they're truly passionate about either, but simply because it'll be easier find purpose/meaning.)
After a heartbreak or two, we finally figure out what our deal breakers are. Examples: I can't date anyone who cares a lot about fashion. I'm very attracted to people who dress well, but it turns out prioritizing it means attention and money is spent in ways I can't get on board w/. Similarly, I can't work anywhere that has a lot of mandatory meetings. Counter intuitive because I'm very extroverted and social, but meetings destroy my productivity. I would have never known these things 10 years ago.
Resumes and "dating profiles" don't give us a full picture. What we really want to know is: "Are we truly compatible? Are our goals and values truly aligned?" Those things take time, introspection, and research. However, it feels like job searching/sourcing/recruiting is going in the complete opposite direction (ie. "let's email 1k engineers every day, maybe 1% will respond").
This creates the noise that makes it hard for people who've figured out what they are looking for to find it.
To me, staying passionate and excited about the work you do is simply following what excites you. It's easy to feel more constrained than you actually are. You don't need to follow the management track at your company at all. You can be an IC forever. You can also find a new team, or a new company! You can be a consultant and chose which companies/projects to work with/on (and only choose the ones that genuinely give you goosebumps, they're that exciting!). You can, as you mentioned, transition into new fields/industries.
Your career doesn't have to be linear. I went to grad school to get my PhD in Neuroscience because I thought I wanted to be an academic professor. Two years in, I dropped out because, even though it was intellectually challenging, it didn't fan my flames. (I felt so trapped and uninspired.) I then worked as an operations manager at a startup called Homejoy. It was there where I realized how powerful coding was. After Homejoy, at 26yo, I learned to code. For two years, I did freelance web development and then almost exactly one year ago today, I started working on a side project that very quickly became the only thing I wanted to work on. I'm now a founder of a company (Key Values) and every single day I'm doing something that's new, challenging, and exciting to me.
>>> How do you know when it's time to be okay with [...] trying something radically different?
You should always be okay with trying something radically different (ie. don't be afraid). Maybe the real question is when do you pull the trigger?
It helps to first know what your personal values are, and then you can ask yourself: "Are my behaviors in alignment with my values?" If the answer is no, it's time to make a change!
If you ask me, you should be excited / stimulated / challenged / inspired every single day. We have a pretty limited amount of time on planet earth, so it's really on us to make the very most of it.
https://www.keyvalues.com/diverse-engineering-teams
Even better than just having diverse team members, here are engineering teams that list "Actively Practices Inclusion" as one of their top values:
https://www.keyvalues.com/values/actively-practices-inclusio...
Hope this helps!
Candidates want to know about as much as possible before investing hours/days/weeks interviewing at a company. Who wants to waste all that time trying to get an offer from a company they don't even want to work at?!
Here are things candidates might want to know about:
- office layout
- on call schedule
- lunch traditions
- support for personal development
- organization/structure (ie. pods vs. teams)
- engagement with the greater community
- participation in meetups/conferences/hackathons
- ability to move between teams and change projects
- culture of promotion (external or from w/in?)
- hiring goals for the next 6, 12 months
- composition of team (X frontend, Y backend, Z data, etc)
- interview process
- employee retention
- diversity goals and metrics
- flexibility of working arrangements
- frequency and duration of meetings
- opportunities to mentor interns or junior devs
- code reviews
- post mortems
- tooling (ie. for revision control)
- how often do people pair?
- channels to provide feedback to executives
- contributions to open source
- average age?
- support/benefits for parents
- "busy times" or "peak seasons" for the company
- runway
- hobbies/interests of current team members aka future coworkers
- level/amount of interaction between me and users/customers
- ability to work remotely
- support for IC vs. management tracks
- amount of collaboration between departments
- is this job available because they're fortifying existing teams or spinning up new ones?
- general, day-to-day working hours
The list goes on and on.
I also wrote tons of questions for candidates to ask during their job interviews to get information about all of the above: https://www.keyvalues.com/culture-queries
I try to do this exercise at least once a year. It helps me to distill what it is exactly I'm working towards. Your values will change over the course of your life and it's important to continuously re-evaluate what matters to you now. With your values in mind, you can then make sure that your behaviors are in line with what you care about most. Having a general "north star" will help you evaluate different options as you continue to brainstorm and think about what you want to do next.
Good luck! And congratulations! :D
I too have changed jobs and careers several times since graduating college. Strangely, doing so has actually been liberating for me. I entered a PhD program immediately after college, obsessed with not only being the greatest, but also the youngest. (I didn't just want to "break records," I also wanted to be many years younger than the previous record holder when I did.)
I let go of these fantasies the moment I dropped out of grad school though. I was starting over from scratch which meant I'd be too old to be the best and youngest at anything. And not chasing that goal has pretty much set me free. Everything is way more fun now, including being a complete noob in a room full of experts.
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care... <-- I always appreciated this Scott Adams post. It helped me go from path #1 to path #2.
Ps. Your photos are phenomenal. Thanks for sharing, even though it was scary to! You are (almost certainly) already the top 25% at two or more things. Now how bout dat?! :D
Ps. There has already been discussion on Leap about inviting men to the community, and I'm sure it'll continue to be discussed! I don't think anyone wants to draw lines in the sand or create a "Us vs. Them" mentality. I do think everyone wants to have at least one person, one ally, in their corner though.
Culture Queries is my side project marketing attempt for Key Values. I've been working on Culture Queries for a few weeks on and off.
The team behind Key Values and Culture Queries is just me (oh hi! ) and I care tremendously about my users. Since I've been working full time for the last 6-7 months to build these incredibly valuable resources for people without charging for it, I thought it'd be okay to ask for an email address in exchange. I mean, you can always unsubscribe?
If you find my content to be high quality and interesting enough to want more of it, and you feel frustrated that you aren't getting more... why not stay in touch and let me continue delivering you high quality content? (Serious question.)
Ps. You can always spend 20 seconds going back, selecting fewer values, and seeing the results for those. I won't be mad. Pinky promise.