Coding is boring, unless

This is yet another trend following startup employer who doesn't get it. Really good, seasoned talent wants personal freedom (or more money and equity), and having an 'awesome culture' doesn't have to do with that.

Culture baits are primarily for 20-somethings out of college who don't know better or have nothing better to do. An example of giving developers real freedom: Let them work remotely for n months out of the year.

Yet few will trust developers with real freedom, because it seems too dangerous to most SV startup employers... and there is certainly risk there... But baiting developers with video games, pub trips, and secret cinema is just an extension of constraining said developer's freedom. If they don't care about that freedom, they are either young, in a tough financial position, or aren't top talent.

>A key ingredient here is diversity: hiring people with different backgrounds and origins (e.g. our team of 6 is currently British, French, Russian and Greek). Seeing the same people every day is definitely more interesting if each of these people can brings something different to the culture.

That is why remote work exists, so you can change your working environment by traveling to different places and then learn different cultures. That keeps you away from getting bored.

2 years > 3 years > 1 year > 1.5 years > 1 year

Just started a new job last week too, some cases its been that I haven't enjoyed the agency others its nothing more than the new company offering something better.

I think it's great that the author tries to address high turnover rates by trying to make the company a fun place to work. However, I feel like he's taking the wrong approach.

It's certainly true that developers want to have fun, but I don't think technical decisions should be influenced heavily by what's fun but instead by what makes sense. For example, it'd be a lot of fun to rewrite an entire code base in Haskell or some other language I'd like to learn. I'd very much enjoy working somewhere that I could do something like that. On the other hand I wouldn't recommend doing that ever, because it makes very little business sense.

In my opinion, a much more reasonable approach to letting developers have fun is to give them more freedom in things outside of work. This could be giving them more free time (every other Friday off or something), or even letting them do personal projects to advance their skills on company time. For example, you could host tech talks where employees teach each other things they learned, and also give them time to learn new things, while on company time.

This seems to work better to me because this way your developers have a reason to stay: they will have a hard time finding another company that gives them these perks. On the other hand, you can keep your company's technical decisions influenced by what makes sense as a business.

Maybe I'm just very cynical, but work is work, and I understand that while working I need to do what's best for the company, not for myself. In the same way, your employees will stay if staying at your company is what's best for them.

Nevertheless, it makes me happy to see a company that tries to make its employees happy. I'm just worried that this method isn't really sustainable for the business itself, and if that's the case then I don't think other companies would follow suit.

That photo of six people stacked up working at one conference table, almost jostling elbows, looks like hell on earth for a working environment.