My values for future employers

We are used to seeing companies’ values used to evaluate future employees. This is important to ensure the candidate fits the company culture.

With this post I’m establishing the values I evaluate to decide whether I should stay or should I go.

1. Build for Humans

Since I started my career, I’ve been building for humans. Websites, web applications, mobile applications, APIs, services - all for humans. Artificial Intelligence is a useful tool to scale delivery and helps small teams deliver faster, but it’s not a solution that should put humans out of the loop!

For me it’s important to look for real problems people have and work backwards from them.

For that reason, I value products built for humans.

2. Remote Work

Remote work is hard! It requires a culture built around it, relying on good people you can trust, and a culture of empowerment. Once we have the correct pieces in place, remote work becomes a blessing!

I value people’s time, so I don’t want anybody stuck in traffic for 2 hours a day! I want them to spend time with their family.

I work remotely, but I’m glad to visit the office a couple of times each year!

3. Outcomes over story points

Big teams spend much of their time coordinating work, instead of actually building.

Contractors value the metrics they can put on recurring delivery reports, with all the story points delivered last sprint. For me this doesn’t work!

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” - Goodhart’s law

Instead of focusing on sprint metrics, I like to focus on the outcomes. Delivering impactful products is the best metric of success!

4. Growth Perspective

Good work must be rewarded! I’ve worked in several places where good deliveries were not recognized or valued, draining the engineering team’s goodwill and willingness to help.

If some good work goes unnoticed, it will eventually come back to bite - people leave, people burn out, or - even worse - they stop making any effort to exceed expectations.

Recognition is one half. The other half is growth. I look for places that invest in their people: time to learn, conference budgets, mentorship, and clear paths to level up. A team that doesn’t grow together drifts apart.

5. Small, Async, and Focused

Communication scales exponentially based on team size. I’ve experienced working with teams from 3 to 22 people - and I can say the smaller, the better.

At Amazon, they have the concept of a Two-pizza team, ensuring each team has between 5 and 8 people focused on one common objective. Now that code is cheap, attention is key! So why spend our precious time hopping between meetings to update all external stakeholders and stay aligned?

So when I consider a new job, I like to know how they are organized - I enjoy working in small squads, communicating asynchronously, with a clear focus! Once we reach the goal, the squad ceases to exist and the knowledge is handed off to the team - but we can always spin up a new squad when needed ;)

6. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion

Tech is about people! To build it, we need diverse perspectives and backgrounds, with everyone having a seat at the decision table and equal voting power!

Equity involves salary too - I can build from anywhere in the world, so paying “market rate” to people based on their locale seems unfair. Paying people equally is a main differentiator when I’m choosing a place to work.

Distributing opportunity equally requires active work.

7. Work-life Balance

I value places that prefer people over profit and tend towards staying longer.

I look for healthy and sustainable places to work. I know sometimes rush time is needed, but that doesn’t need to be a pain - we can always give people time to recover after meeting the goals!

8. Autonomy and Trust

I do my best work when I’m trusted to make decisions. I don’t need someone looking over my shoulder, and I don’t want to babysit others either.

The best managers I’ve worked with set clear outcomes and step back. They don’t care how I get there, as long as I do. Micromanagement kills motivation faster than almost anything - it’s a signal that the company doesn’t trust the people it hired.

Give me a goal and the space to figure out how to reach it, and I’ll find a way. Give me a step-by-step plan and daily check-ins, and I’ll spend my energy looking busy instead of doing the work.

9. Mission

I need more than a paycheck - I need to believe in what I’m building. I’ve worked on products I couldn’t explain to my family without feeling embarrassed, and the energy drain is real. You can’t do your best work for years on something you don’t believe in.

A good mission doesn’t have to save the world. It just has to make someone’s day a little better - and the team has to be able to explain it in plain words.

If a company can’t tell me why they exist and who they serve, that’s a red flag. If they can, half the interview is already done.

10. Engineering Practices

I want to work with people who care about how things are built, not just whether they ship.

That means tests - not for the sake of coverage numbers, but because the team has agreed they matter. It means code reviews that teach something, not just gatekeep. It means CI that runs in minutes, not hours, and on-call rotations that don’t punish the people carrying the pager.

I’ve seen teams ship fast because they took the time to slow down. Good tooling, good docs, and a culture of “leave it better than you found it” compound over months. The opposite - cowboy culture and duct tape - feels fast for a sprint, then collapses under its own weight.

I don’t need a perfect engineering org. I need one that learns.

I’m reducing my job opportunities

Yeah, I know. It will be considerably hard, but I’m sure when I find a place that matches all my values, I will stay without an annual burnout.

A mismatch on values is expensive for everyone - the company gets a frustrated employee, and I lose time I’d rather spend building something that matters. I’d rather pass on a good offer than settle for a bad fit.

And that’s ok! Freedom is about saying no to things, people, and companies.