When I was applying to college some years ago, one of my teachers asked if I thought I would regret not applying to more prestigious schools, making the observation that it's not whether the professors would be good–the professors are good everywhere–but rather about the quality of the student body. Would I learn from my peers?
I hadn't thought of that conversation in a decade, but it floated up through the layers of memory when someone recently asked why I originally joined Stripe.
Much like a school's student body, talent distributions at a company reflect their values. Learning about a company's distribution is an effective proxy for learning about their intended and actual cultural values, and neatly sidesteps the expected questions that folks are sometimes too careful to answer directly (e.g. is fairness important at your company?).
In my opinion, a company's policies and their approach to policy enforcement are the truest representation of their values: they're where folks make the hard tradeoffs between conflicting values. For example, everyone values both impact and partnership, and it's only in the depths of policy enforcement that those values come into conflict and their relative merits are fully weighed.
Read full article from Talent distributions.
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