ICYMI | A no-nonsense working culture
What makes for a fun job? Opinions vary, but I think it’s agency and impact. Agency means that your colleagues trust you to individually do your best work. It means not being told what to do, nor when to do it. It means working when you want to, and taking your kid to the doctor when you need to. And it means freely discussing designs with colleagues, with mutual respect and without pressure or politics. Impact means that the work you do directly improves the lives of our customers, and therefore makes the company better.
For example, we started out doing Scrum. But the sprint cadence made us take a single hard “do we release or not?” decision every two weeks, and it made no sense. Why not just ship a feature when it’s done? So we ditched the idea of sprints and switched to Kanban. Then we noticed that our Trello kanban board went outdated all the time, but it stopped nobody from shipping. So we cut that out too. Daily standups were interrupting half the team’s flow, so we cut those out too. We kept cutting things out, and by now, we’re a company with no deadlines, no obligatory meetings, no fixed working hours, and no bosses giving you tasks.
This works because, and only because, the entire company consists of people who move the fastest when they’re not held back by process. People who don’t need to be told what’s the most important thing to do right now (and who know to ask if they’re not sure). People who prefer to dive deep and emerge victorious, people who know how little sense it makes to try to split a performance problem into estimated “story point” tasks on sticky notes. People who know how to scope work down into small chunks, so we ship fast increments whenever we can.
But in the end, a pretty photo on the “careers” page touches you once. The freedom and trust to do your best work every day touches you all the time.