Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

I worked at a national laboratory. There were 125 staff to one group leader and one assistant group leader, and they had their own projects too. Everybody who worked together was in the same hallway. Real offices, two people each. Zero remote. Core hours. Gym, cafe, and doctor on site. There were no meetings, just presentations you could go to. I didn’t use my calendar. Project matching was a natural process; you just had to report a rough fraction of time for each thing you were working on. Performance conversations 1:1 once a quarter with group leader based on feedback collected from project leads. 1-page writeup once a year. Projects always require senior staff to work with junior staff. Constant in-house education in scientific computing. Full access to journals and site licenses for just about any software. In general, you knew everybody that controlled any resource you might want access to.

Really didn’t value that place enough.

We are 100% remote with an optional co-working space that is available if you ever want to work at an “office” environment.

Project is managed mostly through airtable with quarterly goals with weekly’s and daily’s (not standup) to check on progress. Then we have a company/team wide call every tues for the weekly brief.

All the above enabled me to have the best environment by then investing in my home office. A space that has a good desk (multitable sit/stand), chair (aeron), and good lighting, not to mention a beautiful machine (iMac Pro).

The issues that followed were more of the focus issues when doing work at home, so I got a pomodoro clock which then made everything seamless.

My most joyful (work wise), efficient and productive 5 weeks ever were: * in a remote place, visiting and living with my grandparents * in a village with little civilization but tons of nature around * when for a break I could just go outside house, hike around the barn, watch village folks going about their business in the farm or around the kettle * with big time zone difference from the rest of the team that allowed only occasionally for 1 hour of overlap to sync up * with my wife being away for her studies in a different country (told ya it was joyful only work-wise!!) with fixed limited hour to catch up on a phone.

In those 5 weeks I’ve built the major part of the scalable distributed OLAP Cube that had proved to be very simple, robust and reliable and was still in use to support telemetry of over hundred of customers after 5 years.

The biggest distractions were a cat, incredibly beautiful rain showers, and warmest ever discussions at the dinner table.

My best experiences, as I think about it, tend to have these patterns:

- No Slack for non remote

Slack is cool, but I remember thinking that if I needed to talk to someone, it's over email or in-person. This really encouraged face to face or email conversation. There was also Skype for remote workers, but if you're not doing remote, you could kill Slack. Now that I think about it, Slack is more of a vitamin than a pain killer for non-remote organizations. Slack is great for remote though and love it.

- No Agile

Ah, I remember when I had my first job using Agile. It was cool the first few weeks and that was it. Again, it's not a pain killer, it's a vitamin. I had the best time ever just sitting in meetings on Tuesday mornings to demo everything in person then do code review with my CTO after. Talk with the whole team including marketing on what we'd work on. I loved it. No agile, was completely in the know and performing.

- Support with Tools

It sucks not having the right tools to do the job. Receiving the appropriate hardware, desk, and software has always been useful and makes me happy to come into the office. It really sucks when you wake up, look at your amazing at home desk, then go to a lousy work desk. Bling out the work desk. You can do anything from getting a top end work computer, a great monitor, an eGPU (may actually save a company money from AWS bills), a DAC/AMP (cause devs usually have a thing for headphones and the budget for great ones), or a desk goes up and down and has memory settings and it's fast.

- Minimum Friction

If you get told you need to change up your landing page, change up the tooling, or do a big refactor on something, always take it seriously. Some people marry a concept or an ideal and it can often cause friction between the team. Giving up the consistency and letting others use what best let's them get their job done should be given time and thought. All in all: be fluid with company practices and not letting a "mono-culture" take root is usually best.

My best experiences have been when a single employee can happily recommend a new way that could radically change the initial experience of a customer or a company culture. The fluidity maximized sales and development.

- Wrap up

We have so much now with tools that can be categorized as pain killer or vitamin. My best recommendation is to have less vitamins and more pain killers.

Note: This is just me though. I know a lot of other people have different ways they prefer to work. This is just me.

Now I’m really curious which national laboratory, though I’m guessing if you were comfortable saying you would’ve done so.