I was at this talk (given at CodeMash a few days ago). It spurred a lot of discussion/opposition over the fact that it revolves so heavily around only hiring passionate, rock star quality developers that care about the product you're developing.
Small companies and startups often have a product that you can recruit people who are passionate enough about the idea that stuff like this can work out. The problem for discussion is more based on which (if any) of these ideas can be applied to a large corporation where the developers are working on insurance or financial software etc.
Some things that are lost for those only reading slides:
- His main reasons behind this "DDD" policy is that it's the open source model. Developers work on things they care about, when they feel like working and then every hour they spend "working" is a valuable hour of work. Any policy that forces or even simply guilts people into a set schedule or number of hours causes unproductive time and a loss of developer happiness/autonomy.
- He strongly advocates removing money as a motivator. At github apparently every employee makes the same salary.
- The "no vacations" comment comes from him not believing you should track vacations. Employees should but trusted and able to take the time off they deem appropriate.
- At github, the Google "20% policy" is taken to an extreme. People can work on whatever they want on "company time".