Core Values | Hacker News Reader

Core Values

stefankendall.com

> We will not celebrate. Every day will be awesome, or we stop what we’re doing and make it awesome. Cake is for gazelles, and we are lions.

What does this even mean?

Gazelles is a term that describes a lean small business that can change direction and for instance pivot very easily.

A "lion" company is one that is "top of the food chain" and imposes its will upon other companies (think Facebook or Google)

That Zoos can feed their Gazelles left over cake?

So we live in a zoo and eat gazelles. Ok, that makes sense now.

Many offices have parties for releases, or quarterly, or whatever.

Merlinn Mann said it best: If donuts in the break room is the highlight of your day, you need to change what you're doing, or "have more interesting problems."

I highly doubt you won't be celebrating when you make your first million.

edit: And I think you should be! You should be happy, this should be an achievement to you, not just another day at the office. But a day at the office you get to talk about as a milestone.

It's basically just another day in the office. The day before, you had 990,000 (or something). The day after you will have 1,010,000. Nothing has changed, basically.

We have awesome cake every day. Now what?

You will get obese and get tooth decay. Also, I am not jealous of your cake.

To be honest, this seems like a set of 'nice company policies,' rather than core values. A lot of these could be summarized with a single value that they are idealizing. This list looks like a good way to implement those core values.

Edit: Here are the core values of Google, Apple, Facebook, Zynga, Salesforce, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Netflix, HP, Zappos, Twitter, LinkedIn, SAS, and Cisco.

http://bestengagingcommunities.com/2012/07/31/a-sample-of-th...

Great link. Thanks for sharing!

"You are an adult. You will manage your own machine and tools." seems to be almost directly in opposition to "You will not dig ditches here, and we will not ask you to do so."

I'm not sure that's inherently a bad thing though. It quietly pushes towards a follow the standard (hopefully automated) system setup, but feel free to drift from that where it doesn't work for you.

That might be possible if the company is still 100% developers. But once your company grows big enough to hire less-technical people - designers, sales and customer support staff, product managers, etc. - it's probably more cost-effective to have some degree of specialization. I can't imagine that it would be possible for all Google or Facebook employees to manage their own machines and tools.

Even in Eng org we appreciate the tools teams that dig ditches for us.

In a world of "MIS" this sounds like a godsend. Needing someone to come over from another building to let you install a new program is a huge wall of WHY?!

I'm curious about the 2nd item. I'm ambivalent about it. On the one hand I bicycle into work (20 miles each way) and do most of my problem solving and thinking on the way in. But what is the value of having an employee live 50 miles away and driving for 1.5 hours each way (I used to do that too)?

There's no value, and I think that's the point. If it doesn't make sense to commute, you figure out how to work remotely (if it works for the business).

Burning an hour on driving every day (or biking) doesn't help anyone, but an hour of yoga might. Or time with your kids. Or climbing mountains.

Anything but commuting.

> There's no value ... Anything but commuting.

I disagree... I think this sort of "regular enforced idleness" can have real positives.

I used to have a ~45min commute (by train), and I loved it. Going in the morning was a daily time of peace that I could spend idly reading or vegging out and watching the world stream past in the morning sunshine.

The commute back in the evening helped me unwind, and collect my thoughts.

[I now live about 5 minutes walk from work. That has obvious advantages, but I still sort of miss my commute...]

Riding a train is more relaxing than driving....

Indeed; people who drive are probably more likely to consider their commute "useless downtime."

But still, the original article made no mention of mode, and notion that commuting generally is dead-time seems wrong to me.

I find a half hour of biking to work a great way to start the day. More awake and alert than driving or taking transit in.

I recommend that you read "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh, if you hadn't already done so.

In my experience, company values are not declared so much that they emerge in practice. You can write down anything you want, distribute it during orientation, and enforce it with penalties. None of this will create a values document that resonates with the people who actually work in a company.

"You will manage your own machine and tools."

And when nobody can run/compile anyone else's code because everyone has some weird combination of mismatched versions of stuff that happen to work for them but nobody else, this will swiftly end...

This list is very much "we will not have any organization", when the right solution is "we will have as little organization as required".

I'm confused, is this not what generally is done (and works) in open source development?

Agreed. This sounds like unstructured hippy nonsense where we know that real hierarchies will exist and the loudest will reign, whether that's for the best or not. Life isn't a cosy co-op and neither is business. Unless it's a co-op, and they're not cosy.

I made my own list like this before starting Ridejoy and I think it's a great thing to do. Many of the the ideas got implemented, while others I came to realize weren't good ideas, and others I still want to do but it just hasn't worked out for one reason or another. It's great to think about these things in advance, but remember - no plans survive first contact intact. =)

exactly what i thought when i read it. Great to have a plan, but there are a few things on that list that I think won't work in practice, but the only way to find out is to do it!

I would really like to see this happen. There are a lot of idealists who start companies, and most of them fail (most of all startups fail). But we do seem to be moving towards an era where good working conditions are simply more profitable than they used to be-I believe Valve and Github are perfect examples of this.

Love it, and I'd to see or work for a company that abides by those values.

But, isn't Consensus meant to be good for the company?

No, it's mostly for covering your own ass. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DesignByCommittee

Consensus is rarely good for the company, or the product. It just allows people to live in peace, without dealing with the loud, obnoxious, and wrong ones.

(Corollary - if you do a lot of deciding by consensus, it's your hiring that failed you)

Sounds like a fun place to work.

This whole list just begs to be implemented just to see it horribly, horribly crash and burn when it hits reality. Any real company and all real projects are far more complex than that and no matter how great these rules sound on their own, I doubt they will survive the proverbial first contact with the enemy.

Sorry if this all sounds too negative but I have seen so many lists like this, nice sounding promises which never held up in reality as soon as the smallest issues came up.

It's not so much how nice and "totally logical" a value sounds, the important thing is realizing how you will hold up this value and deal with possible trade-offs because every decision and value means there will be possibly negative consequences to it just by the fact alone that you prioritize things.

> Working longer is not working harder. Go home.

Fair enough, except then that one really great opportunity comes around, this huge client who could boost your business to the next level... now tell me you won't bend over backwards for him and so will your team?

> 40 hours includes the commute.

This sounds really great! But John lives around the block and is there in 5 minutes, Jane commutes from the suburbs and it takes her at least an hour by car so there, you "lost" 10 hours of Jane-working and John wonders why he has to work so much more than Jane. You are saying "that's childish"? Well, welcome to working with adults.

> Resist the urge to call a meeting

This could quickly put a damper on communication but ok, whatever floats your boat.

> Consensus is bullshit. Do what’s best for the company.

And this is the first nice-sounding but completely empty word-shell in the list. So we are supposed to JUST do what's best for the company and not care about consensus... what if we disagree with you about what's best for the company? Oh and somewhere else you said "customers are your business" so which one takes precedence now? "Business" or "customers"? Because there are a lot of situations where you might have to do something for a customer even it hurts business.

> We will not ship shit.

So you would rather postpone the launch time and again if it isn't perfect? I am not sure a lot of customers would appreciate this. They EXPECT "not shit" and they EXPECT it on time. Why do you even mention this?

> You will do customer service for the products you create.

How is this even going to work? The more projects I have been on, the more customer service I will be doing and suddenly I end up being a customer service drone and how is that going to be awesome fun every day like you promised?

> We will work in public

What does that even mean? You publish all the code or will you all sit in a café?

> People are expensive. We will strive to keep individuals working for the customer, and not on the business.

The most important duty of management is not to fill their own pockets but making SURE people can keep working for the customer... so if you cut managers, who is going to make sure things run smoothly?

> Efficiency is everything. We will remove obstructions.

Again, a nice sounding shell... it is easy to say "no consensus and remove obstructions" until you are in a situation where cowboy-coding just isn't going to cut it anymore and you will implement some process, some documents, some necessary "obstruction".

> We will not celebrate. Every day will be awesome, or we stop

I will be working more and more on customer service than on new, hot, sexy projects... how is this fun? How do you even think you can make every day awesome for all your employees? Do you realize how empty and worthless this sentence is? It is work - if it was all fun and sunshine, I am not sure you would get paid for it and work is NOT always fun.

> We will enjoy our work, our products, and our lives. We will make work awesome.

You just repeated yourself and it is just as empty. How will you guarantee this against all the things crashing down on you in the day-to-day of project work and customer service?

> We will be lean. We will NOT ignore problems, and we will swarm when issues arise.

What if this directly means it will cut into another customer's work because you need all the right bees swarming on that problem? Does solving those problems take priority over new projects or not?

> You are an adult. You will manage your own machine and tools.

I thought I wouldn't have to do boring grunt work, how about YOU provide me with a nice, lean, modern workstation so all I have to do is sit down and code?

I think most of your objections can be countered with "don't work with idiots." That none is hired should be managements top priority in every workplace.

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