What do you value?

This is one of the most powerful questions we can ask, and I don’t think we use it nearly as often as we should.

As a software engineer planning projects, understanding what our customers, users, product managers, sales, support, marketing, and legal teams value helps me to clarify where to spend our resources, and shines a light on potential gaps and traps whilst there is still plenty of time for course correction.

When I’m building software, understanding what our engineers, reviewers, testers, and dependent teams value helps me write cleaner, more maintainable, testable code.

When I’m testing software, thinking about value helps me assess the quality gaps – the disparities between what we’re building, what we set out to build, and what our stakeholders actually want.

You get the idea. I think about value a lot. But now that I’m looking for the next opportunity, I’m thinking about value more than ever.

What do I value? How does that influence where my career goes next?

What do potential employers value? How do I find that out (especially when “job descriptions” are often just lists of programming languages and responsibilities, with no salary stated)?

As I interview more, I’m getting used to answering a lot of questions that I’ve not had to think about in a while – “What are your salary expectations?”, “Can you come into the office three days a week?”, “Do you know <insert tech stack here>?” – but it wasn’t until yesterday that an interviewer asked me that question that I use all the time: “What do you value?”.

It took me aback, in the best possible way. They got it.

Software engineering is about relationships between people. The designs and docs, the servers and function calls, the ones and zeroes – these are all just means to an end. Understanding what people value, whether they’re your manager, your customer, your legal counsel or your prospective new hire, will empower you to build better teams, better software, and better relationships between people.

So what do you value?

Originally posted on my LinkedIn profile here