We all have a unique set of values, which themselves aren’t good or bad. What informs your (working) happiness is the overlap between your values as an engineer and a startup’s values.
I spend all day, every day matching engineers and startups. Some factors are easy to match on (seniority, shared tech stacks). The hard part is understanding values alignment - a desire for autonomy vs mentorship, an orientation towards solving hard technical problems vs messy customer problems, etc. This is made all the more complex when you ask startups and engineers to tell you what they value in work culture. You get messy, unstructured data in return - hundreds of responses, each using different terms, with no universal shared meaning.
I’ve built an internal map of this unstructured data, and turned it into a quiz so startup engineers can find the developer tools companies (including GitLab) that best share their values. If you’re curious about your own values, feel free to take the quiz and if you’re just curious about GitLab’s values, you can see them here. Would love comments!