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Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#61

Post by guijemont »

At Igalia (http://www.igalia.com/), we are a worker-owned free software consultancy. There's a generic presentation of how we work spread among the various sections of http://www.igalia.com/about-us/, but one of us also wrote a series of blog posts that explains us pretty well: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/05/no-master http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/13/but-that-would-be-an... http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/25/time-for-money

In a nutshell: people who work for Igalia own it (with equal amount of shares, usually after three years in the company) and participate in the assembly (usually after 6 months-a year in the company). From that premise, our decisions and ways of working are generally very flexible towards employees. Having the same salary (with more for people who live in more expensive countries) or being able to work from wherever you want is just the tip of the iceberg.

Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#62

Post by to3m »

codahale wrote: post #43
sciurus wrote: post #38

Can anyone confirm that Github still operates this way?

Some LinkedIn job titles from current GitHub employees: * VP, Business Development & Services * Head of Technology Partnerships * CIO * VP, HR * Vice President, Strategy * Vice President, Marketing * VP Communications * Director of Outreach * Director of Sales

See also: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/technology/valve-a-video-g... - "The few employees who’ve put titles on business cards do so to satisfy outsiders apprehensive about working with people without labels. The same applies to Gabe Newell, one of Valve’s founders."

(no idea whether this is the case here...)

One of my former colleagues had this sort of experience at one job, where his job title was "programmer" (you got this title if you were a programmer; there weren't any others available). He was finding it sometimes difficult to get people to return emails, presumably because he didn't sound important enough. Apparently the last straw was being roundly ignored in a particular meeting with one external company! A swift title upgrade (no changes in responsibility...) fixed all of this.

Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#63

Post by sergiosgc »

znq wrote: post #51
soundlab wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty amazing. Are the founders/management team working towards what might be considered a high rate of growth or an incremental one? In other words, is the staff level, revenue, expenses, and earnings in some way optimized at the current level? Kudos for focusing on your people- this mix is difficult to achieve for what I am assuming is a bootstrapped business and impossible in a venture-backed one.

To be honest, we haven't put too much thought into the business side of things. We've been growing organically from two people (the two founders, I'm one of them) to now 20 people and things always somehow worked out. We're still learning ourselves, though. Pretty much every day. Revenue and expenses are relatively stable. We've some really good quarters, and some not so good ones. But overall we're profitable. Somet…

From past experience, there are two danger points when growing: 25 employees and 50 employees.

At 25, you stop meeting everyone every week. i.e. Random encounters no longer guarantee that every person in the company keeps good contact with everyone else.

At 50 pax, you stop knowing everyone. i.e. You may know the list of employees by heart, but you don't really befriend them anymore.

Of course, these are soft trigger points. You start noticing something different at 20 people, and are sure of what is happening at 30. It is definitely not the fault of the 25th hire :-)

The remedy is always the same: Company culture. Growing slow is a good ingredient towards a good culture, albeit not the single ingredient.

Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#64

Post by flyingfsck »

publicbenemy wrote: post #10

Gore always gets named in this context: http://www.gore.com/de_de/aboutus/culture/corporate_culture.... Atlassian seem to be doing things differently. Umantis in Switzerland democratically elect their CEO: http://www.umantis.com/en/press/haufe-umantis-ag-employees-e... I'm very interested in this question as well, especially companies in Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg and Copenhagen. Anyone else know of companies doing t…

As an end user of Atlassian products - their support leaves a lot to be desired. Not sure if that ties in to "doing things differently" but there you go.

Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#65

Post by RollAHardSix »

fractalsea wrote: post #18
marcusf wrote: post #4

I'm subjective, but I think Spotify uses slightly innovative ways of organising. See: * https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult... * https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/20/spotify-engineering-cult... Happy to answer questions.

I recently spoke to a recruiter at Skyscanner, and he mentioned that they have also adopted a similar model to Spotify. He called the model "Squads and tribes".

Yes, here is a video explaining some of it.

http://vimeo.com/85490944

Never worked at Spotify but they seem very innovative (and they already let me rock out for eight hours everyday), so hey, nothing to bad say on my end.

Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#67

Post by unclesaamm »

ianpenney wrote: post #45
psycr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is management structured? How are product decisions made?

Ah! Josh, your name was familiar to some of my coworkers! A couple of points to answer your questions: - We do centralize our product strategy and portfolio planning, but we decentralize our release and iteration planning. - We focus on building strong teams of diverse talent sets that are becoming more self managing. Teamwork is big for us, flying solo on any task is rare-r than in other places I've worked. - Our ma…

Well, the point is some companies don't have management. Sounds like yours does ;)

Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#68

Post by crimsonalucard »

znq wrote: post #39

Not sure if it's in the same bucket as Valve or GitHub: at Mobile Jazz http://mobilejazz.com we're only 20 people (and that makes things a lot easier), but we've quite a different way of working compared to traditional companies: * We pay fair salaries. For most people in our team it's way more than what they've earned before. * We pay everyone the same (base) salary. Regardless of their role or title. * We pay quart…

bullshit managers are the worst.

Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#69

Post by faizshah »

znq wrote: post #39

Not sure if it's in the same bucket as Valve or GitHub: at Mobile Jazz http://mobilejazz.com we're only 20 people (and that makes things a lot easier), but we've quite a different way of working compared to traditional companies: * We pay fair salaries. For most people in our team it's way more than what they've earned before. * We pay everyone the same (base) salary. Regardless of their role or title. * We pay quart…

Can you explain what your development process looks like?

Do you practice Agile? SCRUM/Kanban?

Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#70

Post by mobiplayer »

znq wrote: post #39

Not sure if it's in the same bucket as Valve or GitHub: at Mobile Jazz http://mobilejazz.com we're only 20 people (and that makes things a lot easier), but we've quite a different way of working compared to traditional companies: * We pay fair salaries. For most people in our team it's way more than what they've earned before. * We pay everyone the same (base) salary. Regardless of their role or title. * We pay quart…

Sounds amazing :-)

However, sometimes we might think that taking the whole company to these great places is the best thing to do, but people tend to end up marrying, having children and getting tired of going to a beautiful island with their workmates when they could just stay at home with their family.

Work/life balance is not imposing our view of a great life to our coworkers. I'm sure you guys are cool with that and you've got a thousand more reasons to be a great place to work, but I wanted to raise this.

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