11–20 of 61 posts
You just had to make the rest of us jealous, didn't you.
> When you hire great people, you can afford to give them a lot of autonomy. I think you have this completely backwards: in order to be great, autonomy is required. There's much written about motivations and what makes people happy in the workplace but micromanagement is one of the most easily recognizable anti-habits of a bad work environment. It breeds resentment and engenders an atmosphere of distrust. Bring out t…
It's probably some measure of both, but from my experience there are some people you can't afford to give autonomy.
The truly interesting challenge will be how effectively they transition these policies as they scale. For example, the flood-of-email with filters works incredibly well for transparency at 40 people, but becomes an unmanageable deluge much past 100. The Capture the Flag runs, though, look like an idea that's both awesome and sustainable.
> When you hire great people, you can afford to give them a lot of autonomy. I think you have this completely backwards: in order to be great, autonomy is required. There's much written about motivations and what makes people happy in the workplace but micromanagement is one of the most easily recognizable anti-habits of a bad work environment. It breeds resentment and engenders an atmosphere of distrust. Bring out t…
It's probably some measure of both, but from my experience there are some people you can't afford to give autonomy.
Enjoy it while you can, it will all go downhill when you start hiring sales/marketing people ... ;-)
If you are a tech company with marketing/sales/BD teams, I have news for you: those people are working at a tech company _for a reason_. They want to be involved in (or at least near) technical things even if they can't contribute in the same way.
Resist the urge to develop isolated tech@ lists. Keep your discussions company-wide even as you grow in non-technical areas. Invite _everyone_ to your technical workshops and reading groups.
At Knewton I've grown tremendously as a marketer, but I've also become interested in the CAP theorem and automated deployment services, learned Git and created some projects, and really sharpened my front-end coding, among other things. I've also had the joy of working with a single developer over a hack weekend to launch a variation of a service that quickly become our top revenue generator and stayed that way for a while.
Get the right people and there's magic waiting to happen.
Enjoy it while you can, it will all go downhill when you start hiring sales/marketing people ... ;-)
[Disclaimer: Stripe cofounder.] I know you probably mean this at least in part in jest, but I've found this to be a pretty common perception in the tech industry. It's probably worth addressing directly. We want to work with the best engineers, but it's arrogant to assume that that's all that we'll need, or that hiring non-engineering people will cause our culture to deteriorate. That's not to say that that doesn't h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[Disclaimer: Stripe cofounder.] I know you probably mean this at least in part in jest, but I've found this to be a pretty common perception in the tech industry. It's probably worth addressing directly. We want to work with the best engineers, but it's arrogant to assume that that's all that we'll need, or that hiring non-engineering people will cause our culture to deteriorate. That's not to say that that doesn't h…
At Parse.ly, we find an easy way of making sales and product teams co-exist nicely is to encourage actual collaboration. For example, some of our engineers built the sales team an engagement dashboard that allows them to track customer usage analytics unified across many of our tracking systems. This makes it clear that the teams have a shared goal and that we can leverage each other's skills to the fullest.
IF it's optional and truly treated that way, it sounds like a great idea to me. Otherwise, I'd consider it downright toxic. At every job I've ever had, I treat my lunchtime as, well, mine. If I need to go run errands, or just want to be alone, or want to go sit at Starbucks and answer emails for the startup I'm working on on the side, whatever, I do it over lunch. Or sometimes I just plain feel like skipping lunch for some random reason. If I had that freedom denied to me, I'd be miserable.
There's a post below, which is [dead], but which raises an issue I was curious about. Is the daily group lunch treated as required, or is it totally OK to skip it? And even if it's not officially required, is there any sort of peer-pressure thing / shunning of people who don't participate? IF it's optional and truly treated that way, it sounds like a great idea to me. Otherwise, I'd consider it downright toxic. At ev…