I'd love to ask you the same question as I did above: what is your strategy in getting the highest paying job? Do you freelance? Have side hustles? Change jobs frequently? Spend time mastering negotiations?
1,824 karma · joined December 30, 2014
Is money the main driver? If so, do you do freelance work or do you always seek full-time employment? Thanks in advance :)
Re: interviews, you're right. It's not brought up very often. Since working on Key Values though for the last several months, I've learned that many women refuse to be the first female engineer at a company. While diversity isn't always visible, many people will simply look at the current team members and draw conclusions themselves.
Lunch time is an opportunity to socialize with your colleagues. It's also a great time for spontaneous collaboration to take place. I've worked at a startup where great ideas were born out of engineers, operations managers, and customer service reps eating sandwiches together. It's cross-pollination that does good for everyone.
A lot of companies also combine lunch with talks, presentations, or team building activities. In general, I care deeply about working with people that I look forward to chatting with during the day.
If you can imagine a place where most people eat alone at their desks, what else might this signal? Maybe people aren't friendly? Maybe everyone is expected to work through lunch? Maybe people are very exclusive and leave the office in group without inviting "outsiders"?
Diversity is a great example. I'm happy to see "Team is Diverse" ranked so highly across the different segments. While it's easy to confuse gender diversity as being true diversity I think people are talking more and more about intersectionality and diversity across race, age, sexual orientation, education, work experience, and also interests. We don't know what people are thinking of when they select "Team is Diverse," but a desire for more diversity of any kind is definitely a good thing.
It is very likely that the most popular values are a combination of what we most value and lack. It's hard to know for sure. Anecdotally, I've spoken with many American developers who disagree with the way their company handles promotions. It sounds like devs are often promoted into managerial roles as a reward for technical ability, even though they don't have experience managing people. Sometimes, they aren't even particularly interested in managing people. I wonder how often this happens, and how many less-skilled developers would succeed in those roles.
The US, despite being more "tech mature" than other countries, still fails to provide work/life balance or maintain quality code. I was honestly surprised to see these two things at the top of every list. It seems obvious that companies would prioritize these two things, yet... they aren't the standard.
Just reading the other popular posts on HN today (ie. https://medium.com/@deusexmachina667/you-fired-your-top-tale...), it sounds like these are common stories. You can be well-respected, be incredibly experienced/knowledgable, and still be overworked and pushed to push code we're not proud of. These things lead to turnover. I wonder if the startup culture in the US ("grow as fast as you can, do whatever it takes!") is especially bad, and contributes to low retention. Probably.
I also feel like I've been a little like Rick before (though in a non-developer role). I learned a lot from that experience and, like you, have matured as a result.
Many people define work/life balance as a 40-hour work work, but I would be willing to negotiate tens of thousands of dollars and more hours/week if I had the flexibility to work when and where I wanted to.
5. Support for physical wellness (whether in food or exercise) is also incredibly important to me.
If you look at https://www.keyvalues.io, you'll see what dozens of engineers said they cared about most when evaluating a new job. I used their responses to create engineering team profiles that would directly address these things.
Not surprisingly, I see many of the same values described in the comments in this post: "Work/Life Balance," "High Quality Code Base," "Flexible Work Arrangements," "Safe Environment to Fail," "Committed to Personal Growth," "Team is Diverse," "Remote-OK," "Thoughtful Office Layout," and questions around how "Product-Driven" the team is.
While I don't have a cofounder or someone who is working alongside me on Key Values, I absolutely would not have gotten here without help. Even without a cofounder, people can (and should!) find help, guidance, mentorship, and support from forums like Indie Hackers and dev.to.
1. Most people feel strongly that some subset of the "values" listed on Key Values don't belong there.
I interpret this as a success!
I've read hundreds of careers pages and countless job descriptions working on Key Values. You know what they all say? "Make an impact, learn a lot, and have fun doing it." I've also talked to and interviewed 100+ engineers to learn what they look for when changing jobs. You know what they always said? "I want to have real impact on the product, learn a lot in the process, and have fun at work."
When everyone checks all of the boxes, we don't get anywhere. I wanted to choose values that were general enough to appeal to multiple teams/people but divisive enough to only be selected by a few. Different values resonate with different people, and that's the whole point. (For the record: I will certainly add values that I've missed over time, but I doubt I will remove many.)
2. Many of us have strong opinions about what certain values signal about a team/company/organization.
These opinions say a lot about our previous experiences. Let me use myself as an example. When I first dropped out of grad school and joined a startup, I genuinely believed that "work/life balance" was a pseudonym for a lack of passion. "If you truly love what you're doing, you don't even call it work." A few years later, I was burned out and swung the other way. I wanted to establish a clear separation between work and personal, so I never worked weekends, never worked late, and never attended company happy hours. Now, I kind of crave that fast-paced, work with urgency kind of environment again. Right now, in this particular chapter in my life, I'd be a little sad if everyone went home at 5pm and I was working by myself until 8pm.
To piggy back on the work/life separation: I am a female in tech who no longer drinks alcohol but I still appreciate teams that do so professionally. My personal experiences with drinking at the workplace happen to all be goods ones. Sometimes introverted, socially-awkward people need a beer to loosen up and I really like connecting with my colleagues on a personal level. I don't feel left out or uncomfortable at events where everyone is drinking except for me, and I know that while this is true for me, it isn't for everyone else.
Sorry to compare looking for a job to dating again, but it works here too. We specifically look for things we didn't get enough of in our previous job/relationship when looking for new ones, and we specifically avoid things that we've made negative associations with in our past (we call them "red flags"). Everyone has their own set of personal experiences to draw from and use to navigate the world.
Thanks everyone for your thoughtful feedback and insightful discussions!
My hope with Key Values is to:
1. Look beyond what companies say about themselves and focus on the culture and values of specific engineering teams.
2. Let job-seekers access information about engineering teams sooner (ie. before the hassles of applying, completing coding challenges, white-boarding, etc).
To your point, how interviewers describe their teams can be vastly different from how it actually is. Whether you "trust" that information or not, at least you have it sooner!
Re: ambiguous "value tags", they're up for interpretation. I encourage you (and others) to read how different teams describe the same value and what it means to them. Also, there are several teams who didn't choose Creative + Innovative, Customer Comes First, and/or High Quality Codebase.
No company will "advertise" that they do not produce high quality, but we still learn something when high quality code isn't included in a team's top values. This is the beauty of limiting teams to 8 values :)
Finding a job is a lot like dating. People typically don't share their worst qualities upfront, and I decided early on that I didn't want to force them to. Instead, I've become more of a coach/cheerleader for both companies and job-seekers.
When I work with teams to write their profiles, it's my job to say, "prove it" when we discuss each value, and suggest that they choose another when they can't. I encourage teams to use strong language, talk about disqualifiers, include concrete examples, incorporate quantitative data, and/or provide links to contact current team members wherever possible. But, for now, I won't make anyone to do or say anything that they aren't comfortable with.
I hope job-seekers are critical when comparing different teams. Some profiles deserve an A+ while others are perhaps a B- (though I won't say which). If you interview 20 different teams, it'd probably be similar. Those that speak your language would resonate with you and those that fail to answer authentically to you would lose you. That's okay.
Ultimately, I'm providing structure for teams to talk about what is inherently subjective and messy. There is no black or white when it comes to culture or compatibility (maybe you've tried setting up two great individuals who just didn't hit it off?) but at least we now have some information to guide our decision making.
Re: locations, I'm w/ you! I was focusing on Bay Area teams to start but then companies in other cities started reaching out! I couldn't possibly exclude them :)