
Show HN: WorkDNA – Attract engineers by showing off your engineering culture - bwb
https://workdna.com/cyberdyne/engineering
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dannykwells
Sorry OP, but my feeling is, without quantitative metrics, this is useless. As
others have said, each company will choose only positive things, and it will
be hard to tell companies apart.

What I really want, and no one has made, is for some comprehensive scraping of
LinkedIn and Crunchbase to help answer the following questions for each
company:

\- Average turn over time for different job types

\- Average experience of new engineers (new grad vs. 10 years)

\- Distribution of management vs. engineers vs. PMs etc.

\- Are management promoted from engineering or hired from outside?

\- Have the founders had successful companies before? In the same area or
different?

\- What schools did employees go to? What is the education distribution of
employees?

\- what's the gender/race/etc. make up? (Does the company _actually_ value
diversity) etc.

Answer those, comprehensively, and I'd easily pay for access to that service.

Alternatively, if you are having companies post jobs, have _them_ answer those
questions (and tell them you'll check against LI/CB). i.e., get _actual_
transparency where it matters, not just fake/propaganda transparency like you
have here. That would actually help me make a decision to apply or not.

~~~
ravenstine
Some of those things you can figure out on Glassdoor, though I guess having
quantitative metrics are better than reviews from disgruntled employees.

I like this idea, but unfortunately it hangs on the existence of LinkedIn. If
for whatever reason LinkedIn changes its structure in a way that makes it
impossible to easily obtain this data, such a service would probably sink.

> \- What schools did employees go to? What is the education distribution of
> employees?

How would you interpret this information?

EDIT: On a somewhat related note, I had a side project a while ago that was
kind of the inverse, which was a tool for employers where they could track
their employee's LinkedIn activity to determine whether an employee was
actively looking for another job or likely to quit soon, allowing employers to
preemptively fire employees that didn't have a future with the company. I
decided not to finish it because I thought it would be a terrible thing to
have exist.

~~~
ghostpepper
>a tool for employers where they could track their employee's LinkedIn
activity to determine whether an employee was actively looking for another job
or likely to quit soon, allowing employers to preemptively fire employees that
didn't have a future with the company

While I applaud you for taking the social/ethical value of your work into
consideration, I have to wonder how this even seemed like a good idea in the
first place?

~~~
ravenstine
> I have to wonder how this even seemed like a good idea in the first place?

I don't know. It just seemed like a funny, evil idea that I could test my
skills with. I wasn't that intent on actually making a business around it,
though I won't pretend like I wouldn't have tried if I thought I could make
millions. The person I am now definitely would be totally against such a
thing.

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bwb
Hi all, OP here.

We think that hiring is stuck in the dark ages.

Engineering candidates have zero visibility into what it is like to work on an
engineering team. They either have to have a friend working there, trust what
the recruiter says, or invest a lot of time in the interview process.

As a result, looking for a job is like putting an offer on a house, but
without knowing how many bedrooms or bathrooms it has. We want to change this
and make it easier for smaller engineering teams to attract great engineers.

How?

Our software platform creates a careers site for engineering teams (the above
link has an example profile). We show engineering candidates the team's
culture, work schedule, technology, and methodologies. Plus a Q&A so
candidates can ask questions before they even apply. The goal is to give
engineers the info they need to get excited about the idea of a new job. And,
give engineering teams a way to connect and attract more engineers who are a
culture match.

What do you think?

Feedback always appreciated :)

~~~
mountainboot
My initial thoughts are that this does not actually tell me anything. Take
this...

"What traits do you value in engineering managers and leadership?"

"Servant leadership is everything to us. We want managers and leaders who are
humble and know that their role is to support their teams and make sure
nothing is standing in the way of doing great work. So not only work blockers
but also ensuring our team has the time and energy to balance their personal
lives with their work lives."

Every company I have ever worked for claims something similar. This doesn't
actually tell me anything. I would still need an inside person to tell me how
it actually is to work at the company.

~~~
bwb
Yep, one thing that is part of our process is pulling specifics for how they
support that value/trait. That means how they spend time or money to provide
that value to the team. You might have two companies that each list "Cross
Department Teams" but how they actually implement that tells you so much about
them (along with specific examples gathered from the individual engineers).

We want to show how the company delivers on that value/trait, and what
individual engineers say as well.

We know we can't be as good as the friend who is on the inside. But, we are
trying to get closer to that gold standard.

------
ummonk
What differentiates this from
[https://www.keyvalues.com](https://www.keyvalues.com) ?

~~~
whalesalad
They’re both a bunch of BS virtue signaling.

I’ve yet to join a company that operates anything like it says it does from an
external/marketing perspective.

The only way to know what you’re getting into is to join, or hopefully learn
it during the hiring process.

~~~
PascLeRasc
After being in the corporate world for a few years, I feel like if a company
has to explicitly say their mission statement or whatever, they're a bad
employer. It's like someone saying "I'm a nice and relaxed person". Let other
people say that about you, and if they aren't then try to change that instead
of just declaring it. If your company has a good culture and impact, that will
be obvious.

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Feeble
What is your pricing?

Also, can the resulting page be customized with company identity and/or hosted
under own domain name? E.g. workdna.company.com

~~~
bwb
Yep hit me up at ben@workdna.com, we just launched our first customers so
money isn't as important to us as finding the right partners to give us
feedback as we build this for them.

Yep we've been doing these from: workdna.com/companyname and we are talking
with some of our customers about mapping this to custom domain names. I'd love
to chat!

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choward
So it's a job posting just formatted differently? I don't get it.

~~~
bwb
The difference in our minds is the level of information we provide that goes
far beyond any job posting I've ever seen. And, so far beyond the generic
careers pages you see everywhere.

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soozzoos
Reminds me of keyvalues.com

~~~
s3nnyy
exists since 2-3 years, inspired by it maybe?

~~~
bwb
I love what Lynne has built!

Def part of our inspiration, but very different from what she is up too.

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paulcole
How does:

> We all start by 9am and finish up by 6pm.

Jive with:

> Flexible Schedule

And:

> Strict 40 hour work week

~~~
remyp
It's a demo profile, not a real company :)

~~~
PascLeRasc
I think some of us just have a bad history with companies not knowing how to
tell time. My current employer has a strict 40-hour work week, 7:30-5.

~~~
bwb
We will def fix that in the next deploy. The intention was it is a flexible
schedule and after 40 hours you go home, no time beyond that. So you come in
when you want and you end when you want and you don't put in more than 8 hours
a day.

