Skip to main content

Culture Matters

Yesterday morning, my software engineering team and I learned that we would be moving into subleased office space on the fourth floor. In the afternoon, with little fanfare and only one cardboard box among us, we moved all our stuff down two floors. In full disclosure, I did offer to buy some at Staples across the street, but nobody really felt it necessary. I think our move exemplifies the kind of culture I want to build as we grow the engineering team: unfussy, collaborative, empowered, pragmatic.

The job market for software engineers in NYC is booming, so it is surprising to many candidates how much we care about team culture. We've declined to make an offer based on culture more here than anywhere else that I've conducted engineering interviews for.

There's certainly a "no assholes" rule around here, but our considerations go deeper than that. Ultimately, we want to hire people aligned with our company's values:
  • Entrepreneurial thinking and action
  • Doing things the right way
  • Teams providing great customer service
  • Decisions driven by data
There are times I wonder why we care so much about this culture stuff, when we have so much work to get done and so few people doing it now. But then we have a day where the team pulls together, like yesterday, and I'm reminded that it's so good to work with a team that has a great culture.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ReactJS, NPM and Maven

I'm just starting to get into working with ReactJS, Facebook's open source rendering framework. My project uses SpringBoot for annotation-driven dependency injection and MVC. I thought it would be great if I could use a bit of ReactJS to enhance the application. If you're looking for a basic conceptual intro, I recommend ReactJS for Stupid People and of course the official documentation  is quite good. In full disclosure, I still have no idea how to do "flux" yet. As an experienced Java backend developer, I'm pretty decent at hacking Maven builds - which is precisely what this blog post is going to be about. First, a word about how React likes to be built. Like many front-end tools, there is a toolkit for the node package manager (NPM). From the command prompt, one might run npm install -g react-tools  which installs the jsx command. The  jsx  command provides the ability to transform JSX syntax into ordinary JavaScript, which is precisely what I want...
21 comments
Read more

Solved: Unable to Locate Spring Namespace Handler

I attempted to run a Spring WebMVC application, and when starting up the application complained that it didn't know how to handle the MVC namespace in my XML configuration. The project runs JDK 7 and Spring 4.0.6 using Maven as the build system. The following is my XML configuration file: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"        xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"        xsi:schemaLocation="         http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans         http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd         http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc         http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc.xsd">          <mvc:annotation-driven/> ...
1 comment
Read more

Capture Everything

This week I've started planning for the next version of our data collection system. The key realization for me is that I do not know all the questions we will need to answer in the future. Our current focus is on specific sequences of click events, but in the future we might want to look at browser versions or behavioral patterns related to IP addresses. If we don't capture user-agent, for example, we won't be able to answer questions about browser versions. If we don't capture IP then we cannot look for patterns in IP addresses. We should store data in a way that maximizes the range of questions we can address in the future. In the past few years, the cost of storing data have continued to fall. We use AWS extensively.  Amazon S3 costs are very reasonable and guarantees a high level of availability. Also, lower compute costs and open source tools like Hadoop that process large data volumes have greatly increased our ability to extract valuable insights from data. So s...
Post a Comment
Read more