A lot of companies print their values on a poster and mention them at all-hands. If that is the only place they live, they are decoration.
Values are only useful if they change what you do on a Tuesday when nobody is scoring you. The job is to translate the poster into the work.
At Conversion Logix the five are hustle, focus, kindness, toughness, and service. This is what they look like in engineering.
Hustle
As an engineer, I show hustle by embracing a tenacious urgency to solve problems and deliver value.
Not frantic. Not burnout as a personality. When production breaks, you do not only file a ticket. You open the logs, find the blast radius, start on the cause. When you are blocked, you move to the next thing that still matters. A closed door is a reason to try another door, not a reason to stop.
Focus
As an engineer, I show focus by building the right thing, the right way, without getting sidetracked by distractions.
Context-switching is expensive. Focus is protecting a block of time and refusing the new framework that is exciting but not the job. Understand the why of the feature before the first line. Every change should be in service of that, not a tour of shiny tools.
Kindness
As an engineer, I show kindness by assuming the best intentions in my colleagues and leaving the code better than I found it.
Kindness is not avoiding the hard conversation. It is making that conversation possible. In review, ask "what if we tried this?" instead of "this is inefficient." Write the docs. Leave the file a little clearer than you found it. That is a gift to the next person, including you in six months.
Toughness
As an engineer, I show toughness by embracing challenges, learning from failure, and holding myself and my peers to a high standard of excellence.
Toughness is staying in the bug for hours because you believe a solution exists. It is owning the thing you shipped, fixing it, and skipping the blame theater. It is arguing a technical path hard, then dropping it when someone has a better one. The friction is supposed to improve the work, not the hierarchy.
Service
As an engineer, I show service by remembering that my code is not the end product; it is a tool to empower our customers and support my teammates.
The clever algorithm is not the product. The person who can do their job because of it is. Ask how the feature makes a client's week easier. Build the internal tool that takes a load off support. Keep your eyes on the user of the thing, not on the elegance of the thing.
If your company has different words on the wall, the exercise is the same. What does that word look like in your role? If you cannot answer, it is still just a poster.