The average person spends 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime. Where people choose to spend those hours has a huge impact on the quality of their life.
We all have a unique set of values, which themselves aren’t good or bad. What matters is the overlap between your values as an engineer and a startup’s values – this will inform how happy you are at work.
At Commit, we spend all day, every day matching engineers and startups. Some factors are easy to match on – seniority, shared tech stacks, familiarity with particular projects and feature tasks. The hard part is understanding values alignment – a desire for autonomy vs for mentorship, an orientation towards solving hard technical problems vs messy customer problems, attention to detail in code quality, a bias for action, the belief that decisions are best made via vocal debate or through written communication with built-in documentation for posterity.
This is made all the more complex when you ask startups and engineers to tell you what they value in a work culture. You get messy, unstructured data in return – hundreds of responses, each using different terms, with no universal shared meaning.
We’ve built an internal map of this unstructured data. When a startup tells us that their culture mirrors a sports team, we know based on the specific questions we ask if they mean that they prioritize collaboration (no ego, it doesn’t matter who scores the goal), competitiveness (we play to win), or adaptability (everyone should be prepared to tap into another player’s role).
We’re open sourcing this knowledge. We’ve taken the questionnaire that all of our new engineers complete at Commit, and turned it into a lightweight quiz that’s open for anyone to take. You’ll get a high-level summary of the values we think you hold. You’ll also learn which of the largest developer tools startups share those values.
If you’re interested in getting a personalized list of companies that align with your values, take the quiz. If you have feedback on the quiz, or questions about our methodology, feel free to reach out to sarah.marion@commit.dev!