I don't know about advertising (and this is a throwaway account) but when we interview candidates, we're clear that our code base has a lot of legacy code and the quality is a mixed bag. We're also clear that while most of our development team wants to improve it, it's a slow process and can only be done in ways that don't slow down feature development.

Developers who are obsessed with code quality have been a mixed bag for us. Several of our best developers are the people who care the most about quality code and push hardest to improve it. On the other hand, we've had people who seem to care a lot about quality, but have no feel for the cost/benefit ratio of any given change, and spend more time complaining about code than actually working on it. The ability to talk about what good code looks like doesn't necessarily translate into the ability to improve flawed code.

I understand the imporantance of balancing business needs with 'clean code' but I think you're setting yourself up for unexpected costs with the mindset that code can only be cleaned up if features can still be delivered at the same speed. Are you doing it by fixing in the natural lulls in development? Hiring more people? Or perhaps by going beyond a 9-5?

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 :)

I also don't drink, and in my (relatively short) experience in the tech industry, the term "social event" almost exclusively refers to events where the primary focus is alcohol. Is this a tech-industry specific thing, or just a thing with "industry" in general?

Last time we discussed our values at work, we thought about what we were trading off and this helped us decide whether they really were important to us.

I think they can mitigate this by making the companies pick a limited number of "most important values". That way they're incentivized to make sure they mention all the things they're actually valuing, and leave out things that they don't actively prioritize (so you may think you have a high quality codebase, but if it isn't in the top 3-4 things you'd mention to a candidate, it's not a value of yours necessarily)

I wish I could find a similar list (that can be trusted to some extent) for my country (India) and all I would be looking for is - work-life balance.

I don't want to drink alcohol in office (if at all I am into alcohol). Instead of playing TT in office I would like to go for a swim, or a game of badminton, or a quite evening stroll.

Bharatiya high five! I know exactly what you mean by the highest value being work-life balance. Please message me as well if you do find a place respectful to employees!

Even just talking about what values your company has is very instructive and revealing. Sure, few people say "we don't value maintainable code", but if you're putting together a list of your four or five core values and you're coming up with things like "speed of execution", "rapid iteration" and you don't put anything about mainainability, the reality is you don't value that.

You might not object to it, but it just isn't important to you - you don't value it.

People are strange.

Do the employees use the product? For some companies it's incredibly important, and for others it's a non-starter (usually B2C).