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

Thanks! Basically, everybody who's been here for more than 3 years is a co-owner. I just did a quick count (I might be off by one or two), and I think we're 36 owners out of 41 people. Our explicit goal when we hire someone is to keep them long term and have them become co-owner. Our workers (including owners) who live outside of Spain (where the company is based) typically have an official status of freelancers, though they have only one client and are as involved in the company as the ones who have a status of employee in Spain.

Hey! Thanks for the long question. I'll pass on your regards to Henrik :-)

> From what I understand, Spotify squads each focus on one area and each squad has very different members so it can stay autonomous. Is that right? What happens if sysadmin / developer / designer from squad X gets hit by a bus ? I'm actually talking about the bus factor [1] here, I hope you are all well :-)

It's not always easy of course. I think the notion of T/M-shaped people apply. E.g. if only one person in a squad can do iPhone development, better spend time training some of the other people to do it as well. It also creates collaboration opportunities, which are highly important to actually make a team work. Then of course there is a lot of fluidity between squads. If squad X needs design help but are out of a designer, squad Y might lend their assistance.

> How often do you change squads ? What about tribes ? The second video mentions "guild unconferences". What is that ? Can squads work remotely ?

It varies. Some people have been in the same squad for two years, others are in new ones every six months. And generally, you change squads and if a tribe move has to happen, that'll happen as part of that. Squads are generally co-located though, so not many squads are remote-composed. A guild unconference is simply an unconference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference) on a certain area, e.g. Machine Learning, Web, Mobile, Backend etc. So all the people who are interested in that get together for a day and debate the future of that area.

> How does code review work at Spotify ? For the last 2 weeks, we've been using pull requests on Github, which I've found to be a very good way of doing code review. Since the reviewer is the one to merge, eventually his/her name is on the commit too, which in my case makes me focus even more before hitting the "Merge" button. Merging creates an explicit merge commit, which makes reverting things easy if needed. And discussion in the comments allow for efficient, asynchronous discussion.

We use GitHub as well. Roughly the same model.

> The video talks about how important trusting employees is to Spotify. That makes me wonder: do employees sign such things as non disclosure or non compete agreements ? what do you (or what does Spotify) think of such agreement ?

We think trust is highly important, and embodied in what we share internally and how open we generally are. Not sure I can comment on the legal aspects of that though.

> For the last few months, I've been reading the Groove blog [2]. Recently, Alex, Groove's CEO, talked about how much time he was spending talking to customers. How much do you (devs, sysadmins, marketers, designers, etc) communicate with users ?

Never enough :-) We do spend a lot of time with user research, both structured via our research team but also Starbucks testing, when a few devs go down to the local coffee shop and test features. Then we have community outreach teams that keep us honest and makes sure to push the customer voice inside the company. Also, a ton of engineers hang around on e.g. /r/reddit and asks questions. And when users blog about or voice their concerns, it does make the round on internal lists.

> How do gradual rollouts work ? Do you use a third party service for that ? Would love to learn more.

Mostly custom built, and it varies a bit between the backend and the front end. It's all the usual jazz though, deploying per machine or percentages of users or localized to markets etc.

> Thanks again.

Hope I at least answered some of the questions.

Sorry for late answers here but thanks for asking questions!

> How does accountability work at Spotify? It looks like your squads have a specific goal (and maybe a leader?) but when you get up to the tribe level it wasn't clear if one person is in charge of a tribe, or if a product, design and tech lead all share authority. If that is true, do you guys not suffer from the tyranny of structurelessness? How do you do strategic planning/coordination?

Squads don't have leaders, but they do have product owners who ultimately owns the roadmap of the product owned by that squad. A tribe is lead by a trio of engineering, product and design. Responsibility for the various facets of the tribes output is divided between the three roles.

> How do teams that are not engineering focused get stuff done? For instance a customer support team or marketing team - would it have its own engineers and engineering management?

Yeah, the tech/product side of that have homes in tribes as well.

> Edit: finally, how long have you worked at Spotify with this culture?

I've been here 2.5 years. This structure has been in place for roughly three years, maybe a bit more.

I work for Skyscanner, and can confirm this. It's a very effective model for managing a business this size, and IMHO fosters innovation within the business. Very basic description of the model as it is at Skyscanner:

Tribes - High level products (hotels, flights, car hire)

Chapters - "Departments"; areas of expertise (data acquisition, front end)

Squads - Autonomous project units (New features, development of an existing feature)

Guilds - Informal interest groups (Linux, Python, agile development)

Everyone is in a Tribe and a Chapter relating to their "department", and area of expertise; Squads are formed to work on projects, then disbanded once the project is finished; anyone can join and participate in Guilds, which serve as interest/support groups for technologies/strategies/methodologies.

Edit: Corrected my brainfart. Thanks ssabev! Can't believe I did it twice...

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.

Sometimes. But as a general principle, we ship on quality, not time.

Great to hear. And yeah, Henrik is teaching wizard. I'm sure he'll be happy to hear though :-)

We make those things optional. We're at the moment on Koh Samui with 6 people, while the majority of the team is still in Barcelona and a few others at random other places.

Everyone should do what they think is right for them in their current situation. We just want to give options :-)

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. Sometimes we also spend a lot of money on "fun" things without thinking too much and then realize later that we need to be a bit more careful with spending ;-) In particular cash flow issues when waiting for the big corporations to pay their invoices.

In terms of staff, we're actually at the moment not growing that much any more, simply because having too many people makes it difficult to run such a business as the "family & friends" feeling gets lost and we'd probably need to introduce more hierarchy, which we also don't want.

We've regular BBQs. We usually let you guys know. Just come up next time and say hello :-)

Hahahah, crazy!

Depends on the project. We've clients ranging from tiny startups up to huge multinational companies. So we usually adapt to their preferred processes with some recommendations from our side.

We're currently at around 53k€ for someone who works full-time, which is slightly above average for Germany and very high for Southern Europe, where most of our people are from.

We also have a few from Latin America, Eastern Europe and Mauritius, where this is also a very good salary.

We weren't looking specifically in those countries nor are we limiting ourselves, but it simply happened that we found people through contacts in our personal networks.

One of the things that formal organizational structures provide is a set of tools you can use to fix logjams when consensus-building isn't possible.

By building an organization only on de-facto group dynamics, you toss away all of those tools and you have literally no option but to play along with these informal processes.

One of the few things modern management practice has identified for success is that informal processes need to be brought under some semblance of organizational control or they become incestuous and optimize for local efficiencies rather than enabling the entire organization to be successful.

>Again, at every large company I have worked for the "dictators" of successful projects were rarely the people with official ownership of the projects or people high up in the org chart. So I'm not sure why nobody could assume the role of dictator.

Here's how this works in flat organizations

employee a: I need you to do this

employee b: no

and that's the end of the story. Sometimes, if the organization is setup according to some kind of flat org theory you'll get these steps also

employee a: well I'm going to take this to committee

employee b: ok

<months pass, committee meets>

employee a: I told employee b to do the thing and he said "no"

employee b: employee a was acting like my boss and we're flat, I didn't feel the need to give into his demands (committee members nod in assent)

committee: we've decided that employee b does not, in fact, need to do the thing

and now the thing doesn't get done

Here's how it works in a grown-up organization

employee a: I need you do this

employee b: no

employee a: boss, I need b to do this for <business reasons>

boss: employee b, do the thing

employee b: no

boss: rethink that

employee b: okay, I'll do it

souls are crushed, free will is diminished, but the thing gets done and the company moves on

However, more importantly, many so called "flat" organizations are not, either formally or informally. Informally they'll all succumb to informal group behavior that all humans exhibit in groups of more than 1. Formally, they'll all have some kind of hierarchy, but will attempt to hide it or obfuscate it in some way. This is usually tested trivially by offering to swap a low-level employee with a high-level one and seeing if it actually happens (hint it almost never will)

Is that a problem with the company or with your friend? A lot of people really just seem to want the power to boss others around.

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.

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 management (and everyone else) are really accessible for a medium sized company. I have faith that if I sent a calendar invite to our C*O for a 15 min chat on a free timeslot, they'd show up. Of course, respect goes both ways and I wouldn't book their time unless I really needed them specifically and it couldn't be handled asynchronously.

Thanks for the questions!

We also have/use:

- TDD

- pair programming

- git flow

- a 2-week release cycle

- four dev teams

I'm not sure about a completely flat structure, but they do value the actual work done than the post of an employee.

Employees are often encouraged to move between products as both of them mature.

Their attrition rate is also very very low.

Found this from 2011: http://www.managementexchange.com/story/its-culture-stupid-h...

and of course their official pages on it: https://www.atlassian.com/company/about/values

Yes I think this is what the question is about. Some people might call it "Holocracy" or something like that...