As a starting point I imagine an open floor plan with plenty of room between desks, and conference rooms for private discussion. I am interested in private offices but I don't think we'd find affordable space to do that.
Your starting point is my ending point.
Nothing stands in the way of deep focus like open floor plans.
Nothing stands in the way of producing extraordinary results than lack of opportunity to focus deeply.
And nothing stands in the way of being a great place for me to work than not being able to produce extraordinary results.
I would turn your strategy around by first finding proper working conditions for workers (for me, this means an office with a seat facing a door that closes) and only then adding the perks (coffee, snacks, email, vacations, etc.) that don't make any difference if we don't already love our work.
Before offices or open concept, an ability to work distraction free is necessary.
I had a dedicated office for about a decade starting at 18, and an open office for about half a decade since. Before that I've also worked out of my bedroom and basement for a few years.
Interruption and distraction are the enemy of productivity. Managing these two monsters is essential, whether it's the people in the room or what you let distract you on your screen.
I noticed noise canceling earphones did more for me than anything else. same goes for earplugs. Having a clear list of what to do is essential to get you started. Turning of all notifications including email and im was really helpful as no walls protect against that. I keep my phone on silent and no vibrate. think some of this stuff stands out once you've worked for a while and noticed the ultra productive times vs. not.
Very little is so important it can't wait. If it is, someone will interrupt you. Making this clearly known is important to anyone who might assault your space, and physically or electronically.
Finding your formula of how to become deeply focused and productive is important, but realize it may not be one formula for everyone. Some people benefit from being in the same room to keep them focused (this is especially true when younger), and and others do better in a cave like an office. Whatever it is, understand it's about going to that inner cave in a way and managing the distractions and interruptions.
While I do agree, I've gotten quite a lot of work done in open floor plan offices. Enough that I think it's fine to start with, especially since our company is so early stage.
The email thing is a great idea IMO, first.last is great until you grow and the second and third John Smith start working for your company. Then you run into the "Who is [email protected]"? issue. Your email system has a directory, use it and let the employees determine their address.
The "just take vacation whenever" thing works great until it doesn't. What do you do when:
- You have burnt out people who won't take vacation.
- Employee X has a husband with a terrible medical condition who is taking off excessive amounts of time. When do you stop paying her for this time?
- Employee Y crosses the invisible line and becomes a "slacker" because he takes too much time.
- Supervisor Z makes it difficult for employees to take anything more than a long weekend.
- Employee ZZ takes on reconciling the credit cards that everyone has access to, and uses this position to embezzle from the company. He's always busy, so doesn't take time off, and nobody else looks at the statements.
IMO, the issue to the company is that you don't want to accrue lots of liability for paying out accrued time. So figure out another way to do that. Want to make people happy? Give them 6 weeks of PTO, minimize accruals, and do a year-end shutdown that forces them to burn a week. Start with some sort of written policy -- people need to understand what they can and cannot do.
In my experience, a very important component in attracting and retaining great employees is providing them with meaningful and challenging projects. The best need to apply their skills to solve problems that they find interesting. In the process, they get to learn new skills they value. No amount of office equipment/swag/benefits will keep the really good employees if their minds are not kept stimulated and engaged.
1. Telecommuting.
2. Small office with doors for every developer. No cubicles or open spaces.
3. Good workstations with headphones.
4. Good lightning plus an extra lamp.
5. A white board.
6. A bookcase.
7. One of those anti-fatigue floor mats (for when I work standing up.
Optional:
Credit card to buy books/materials.
Tickets/time to go to conventions.
3 monitors.
The "take off whatever time you want" vacation policy has its problems. For me, it was the tension between my urge to skip work on a beautiful summer afternoon and my Yankee work ethic. Some days it was torture but I never did take an afternoon off. :{
With most (all?) good employees your problem isn't them taking off too much time, the problem is getting them to take their vacation when they should. From a strictly business sense, vacation's purpose is to refresh the employee and make them more productive. If you're paying for vacation days and they aren't getting used, you aren't getting what you payed for.
I think a vacation policy should encourage people to take time off without feeling guilty. Here's my proposal:
Your get 4 weeks a year the day you start (pro-rated) and thereafter on January 1st. You don't have to take them all but they expire at the end of the year. This reduces the mental justification for not using your vacation ("I'll use it next year") yet you can still take a vacation in January if you want to.
Not long ago, I worked at a large investment bank (which shall remain unnamed). Not only were we forced to use horrible networked computers running on XP with Excel 2002, but were also forced to use IE8.
However, one can only tolerate so many browser crashes before he begs permission from IT to install Chrome. That was a glorious day.
This is one of the best lists about employee benefits I've read in a while. IMHO, the best point is about the vacation policy. Startups that I've worked at generally have a flexible vacation policy, but the hardest part is making sure that team members are actually using it. It's easy for the lines to blur and to keep working with no time off.
Another thing that I think startups struggle with is letting people work when they want: ie. if I want to work and am productive late at night or on Saturdays, and I feel like taking the morning off or a weekday off, I should have the liberty to do so. But, this is really hard when you have other employees who all adhere to schedules and you want to have meetings. Perhaps it can only be accomplished at a later stage.
Author here. I didn't mention anything about meetings, but I should have. I don't like them, but I think it's fun to hang out and brainstorm. I think it's important to schedule things in advance, so you don't feel like you are missing something by working from home.
I think flexible work hours are great. It will be our job to make sure we make our employees feel comfortable working the times they work best.
> this is really hard when you have other employees who all adhere to schedules and you want to have meetings.
I think that is what managers are for. The manager's job is to facilitate communication between team members. If one person is more productive during the night, the manager's job is to step in and make the communication burden minimal.
"I'd like us to all have quality chairs and desks, with a fun office space that we can be proud of. Basically, that means having a ping pong table and a kegerator (at least!)."
And a wall covered in magic whiteboard with kanban boards &c so your (hopefully plentiful) employees can see the progress and find the rocks in the river easily.
Actually, as a non-technical person, some of the best short term projects I was involved in years ago were in crummy offices that NGOs could afford to rent. We just made it work, but I suppose the commercial start up thing is different.
It's kind of obvious that the guy who wrote that email has never had to put together a workplace. 'Pick your computer'? Come on! You'll have 10x more hardware support!! 'Pick your OS'?! Are you insane? How is your team going to work if they are all on different OS?! The no vacation policy is horrible. It only encourages people to work more. The 'clear salary' system is just not feasible. You have to have leeway in the compensation you give to anyone.
I am standing by the computer part. The technologies we use are pretty standard web dev stuff (HTML/CSS/JS and Python/Django). As long as line endings stay Unix, it doesn't matter what machine you use.
I think it's crucial that developers use the environment they work best in. If you can build the same software on any OS, you should get the one you prefer.
At our size, I'm not worried about hardware support, and I'm guessing most people will want a Macbook Pro anyways.
On the choose your own OS, this is why Vagrant was made. It's not like the company is going to provide any meaningful operating system support at that size (or really at any size for a developer) so there's really no benefit to forcing people to use a specific OS.
Nice list :) I would add to the top of the list "Make sure you stick to your culture no matter what."
It is too easy to push culture in background when times are busy. Culture should be number one priority in any business otherwise it just fails.
first, I think this list is a great conception. But personally I've worked in companies and in situations where many on this list were already there. So here's my personal take on several on this list, these are all just my suggestions and thoughts feedback is welcomed, since I'm very interested in building up a good work atmosphere :)
1. "No defined vacation policy" - you do consider this, but I think it will still be a problem actually making people take time off especially if this is just left up in the air for the developers, as a dev you need time off but you're so consumed with your project and its such a part of you that I find myself never doing this unless I know that I have to take 4 weeks or whatever per year, then I can alot time for it. So I think the "loose" idea is good but there probably needs to be a basic timeslot for vacation, or suggestions or something so people don't get burned out.
2. "Company credit card access" - this is another really good idea, but I'm the type of person that feels uncomfortable with this sort of thing (don't know how others are?). Personally, I'd just like to know that hey, you have such and such amount of money for general courses/books per year, if you don't use it, well ok it doesn't get added to your salary but its always there. I don't know that's just my opinion of what I like. Then I feel comfortable, buying resources that aren't %100 percent work related (say a book on Functional Programming, when all I do is build rails apps).
3. "They pick their computer" - yes, dead on, this is a must in my opinion, though if someone picked windows I might actually be apt to deny them - jk. Also I might go so far as to say dual or tri wielding with the monitors is a company mandate.
4. "Let them pick their own email address" - I actually disagree on this one. I think there should be a well defined email schema from the onset such as [email protected] so that you end up with descriptive namespaces for individuals in the company that everyone can remember and looks professional on businesss cards and in to/from headers, not things like [email protected].
5. "Dedicate time and resources to learning." - I agree with just about everything here. I would actually even go further though (haven't tried this, its just a thought), and concretely set asside a time, say Friday afternoons, where no one is allowed to work, but its hacking time, where they can work on side-projects or experiment with new things, just so everyone can stay uptodate, work on their own stuff, and head into the weekends with a good relaxed feeling.
Thanks! Yea, the vacation policy is getting the most feedback on here. I like the spirit of it, but I think it's clear many people find it keeps them from actually taking vacation.
I disagree with some of this list. Having never started a company but worked at a few, here's my opinionated and uninformed rant.
Picking your own email address and hostname sounds fine in theory, but as the company grows, having a naming scheme like first initial last name lets you email people easily without having to remember the format that they chose. Plus it means that the first few employees get all of the cool email addresses ([email protected], etc), and it's hard to change emails down the line.
And no vacation policy sounds nice in practice, especially as an employer (we're all adults, be responsible), but it falls apart quickly especially if people are workaholics and don't take vacations. I have trouble taking vacation as it is, with no defined policy, I basically don't. It would be even harder if my boss didn't take vacations. Now, this isn't my employer's fault directly, but I would prefer a defined vacation policy with a no sick day policy (or better yet - "if you're sick at all, don't come to work or you're fired") and an understanding of short term tradeoffs for when you do things like pull all nighters.
Company credit card is great. I'd even go so far as to say tell every person - here's $500 to spend each year making yourself more productive. Then let people (subject to approval) buy whatever they want.
As for a clear salary system - in theory, sounds reasonable, but you have to be flexible with salary since you don't want to lose good developers because your "culture" says you can't pay someone an extra $5k/year. And if you start making exceptions, I think that's worse, since it gets perceived as favoritism. At the same time, that salary talk should happen twice a year, no exceptions. There should also be performance reviews every six months, and the performance reviews and salary conversations should not be the same thing (since otherwise I think people will just wait to answer the question of "am I getting a raise" and ignore the rest).
Quality furniture and office space and pick your own computers - very yes. Again, I'd say - here are some recommended/common setups, but here's $5k (or more) to spend on your office. Also, quiet space is so important, I hate open offices. If you're a small company, you take what you can get, but once you are big, at the very least have pair offices. Distraction due to random noise costs me days of productivity, and I'm generally pretty focused. I have a Herman Miller Embody at work, oh god that chair is awesome.
Snacks - I really like free lunches, not for the financial benefit because I figure it comes out of my salary anyway, but because it means I can get healthy food and I don't have to think about it. Also, get healthy office snacks as well as a bit of junk food.
Hours - I tend to work in long periods of high productivity followed by long periods of low productivity, so my work hours fluctuate a lot. I have friend however that works at a company that is quite strict about 9:30-6:00pm every day (as in, get in slightly before 9:30 ever day, and everyone is out before 6:00pm), which seems reasonable. I think that in a lot of companies where people are at work for 12 hours a day, they're not doing 12 hours of work but filling time to save face. So having never experienced a more strictly regimented day, I think that it might be interesting.
And no vacation policy sounds nice in practice, especially as an employer (we're all adults, be responsible), but it falls apart quickly especially if people are workaholics and don't take vacations.
Exactly. I would respond to this policy by never taking any vacation time ever, or, at the very least, feeling guilty every time I did.
For the email policy, I see that point. I hope that under 20 employees that won't be an issue considering Gmail auto complete, and mailing lists, but I'm going to have to be careful about it.
I agree with the vacation issue. I wonder if there is a way to encourage people to take any time off they need, but not worry so much about allocating individual days to it? Also, I don't love "earned" vacation as it seems to say we don't trust you enough yet to take vacation (if they are an early employee), and it's annoying having to delay vacation until you've put in an arbitrary amount of hours.
That will be the challenge. Right now none of these are implemented, so we are going to experiment over the coming year and also take feedback from this HN post into consideration.
[+] [-] edw519|13 years ago|reply
Your starting point is my ending point.
Nothing stands in the way of deep focus like open floor plans.
Nothing stands in the way of producing extraordinary results than lack of opportunity to focus deeply.
And nothing stands in the way of being a great place for me to work than not being able to produce extraordinary results.
I would turn your strategy around by first finding proper working conditions for workers (for me, this means an office with a seat facing a door that closes) and only then adding the perks (coffee, snacks, email, vacations, etc.) that don't make any difference if we don't already love our work.
[+] [-] j45|13 years ago|reply
I had a dedicated office for about a decade starting at 18, and an open office for about half a decade since. Before that I've also worked out of my bedroom and basement for a few years.
Interruption and distraction are the enemy of productivity. Managing these two monsters is essential, whether it's the people in the room or what you let distract you on your screen.
I noticed noise canceling earphones did more for me than anything else. same goes for earplugs. Having a clear list of what to do is essential to get you started. Turning of all notifications including email and im was really helpful as no walls protect against that. I keep my phone on silent and no vibrate. think some of this stuff stands out once you've worked for a while and noticed the ultra productive times vs. not. Very little is so important it can't wait. If it is, someone will interrupt you. Making this clearly known is important to anyone who might assault your space, and physically or electronically.
Finding your formula of how to become deeply focused and productive is important, but realize it may not be one formula for everyone. Some people benefit from being in the same room to keep them focused (this is especially true when younger), and and others do better in a cave like an office. Whatever it is, understand it's about going to that inner cave in a way and managing the distractions and interruptions.
[+] [-] yesimahuman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pteredactyl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|13 years ago|reply
The "just take vacation whenever" thing works great until it doesn't. What do you do when:
- You have burnt out people who won't take vacation.
- Employee X has a husband with a terrible medical condition who is taking off excessive amounts of time. When do you stop paying her for this time?
- Employee Y crosses the invisible line and becomes a "slacker" because he takes too much time.
- Supervisor Z makes it difficult for employees to take anything more than a long weekend.
- Employee ZZ takes on reconciling the credit cards that everyone has access to, and uses this position to embezzle from the company. He's always busy, so doesn't take time off, and nobody else looks at the statements.
IMO, the issue to the company is that you don't want to accrue lots of liability for paying out accrued time. So figure out another way to do that. Want to make people happy? Give them 6 weeks of PTO, minimize accruals, and do a year-end shutdown that forces them to burn a week. Start with some sort of written policy -- people need to understand what they can and cannot do.
[+] [-] yesimahuman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] molbioguy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaggederest|13 years ago|reply
I telecommute full time, and there is no substitute for the flexibility and accessibility.
[+] [-] yesimahuman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orangethirty|13 years ago|reply
1. Telecommuting. 2. Small office with doors for every developer. No cubicles or open spaces. 3. Good workstations with headphones. 4. Good lightning plus an extra lamp. 5. A white board. 6. A bookcase. 7. One of those anti-fatigue floor mats (for when I work standing up.
Optional:
Credit card to buy books/materials. Tickets/time to go to conventions. 3 monitors.
[+] [-] yesimahuman|13 years ago|reply
It seems the only option is to build them yourself inside the office, since many office spaces are pre-built for cube farms.
[+] [-] garrynewman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisbennet|13 years ago|reply
With most (all?) good employees your problem isn't them taking off too much time, the problem is getting them to take their vacation when they should. From a strictly business sense, vacation's purpose is to refresh the employee and make them more productive. If you're paying for vacation days and they aren't getting used, you aren't getting what you payed for.
I think a vacation policy should encourage people to take time off without feeling guilty. Here's my proposal: Your get 4 weeks a year the day you start (pro-rated) and thereafter on January 1st. You don't have to take them all but they expire at the end of the year. This reduces the mental justification for not using your vacation ("I'll use it next year") yet you can still take a vacation in January if you want to.
[+] [-] rutigers|13 years ago|reply
Not long ago, I worked at a large investment bank (which shall remain unnamed). Not only were we forced to use horrible networked computers running on XP with Excel 2002, but were also forced to use IE8.
However, one can only tolerate so many browser crashes before he begs permission from IT to install Chrome. That was a glorious day.
[+] [-] tushark|13 years ago|reply
Another thing that I think startups struggle with is letting people work when they want: ie. if I want to work and am productive late at night or on Saturdays, and I feel like taking the morning off or a weekday off, I should have the liberty to do so. But, this is really hard when you have other employees who all adhere to schedules and you want to have meetings. Perhaps it can only be accomplished at a later stage.
[+] [-] yesimahuman|13 years ago|reply
I think flexible work hours are great. It will be our job to make sure we make our employees feel comfortable working the times they work best.
[+] [-] freework|13 years ago|reply
I think that is what managers are for. The manager's job is to facilitate communication between team members. If one person is more productive during the night, the manager's job is to step in and make the communication burden minimal.
[+] [-] brudgers|13 years ago|reply
The must have is don't be an asshole.
[+] [-] keithpeter|13 years ago|reply
And a wall covered in magic whiteboard with kanban boards &c so your (hopefully plentiful) employees can see the progress and find the rocks in the river easily.
Actually, as a non-technical person, some of the best short term projects I was involved in years ago were in crummy offices that NGOs could afford to rent. We just made it work, but I suppose the commercial start up thing is different.
[+] [-] d--b|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yesimahuman|13 years ago|reply
I am standing by the computer part. The technologies we use are pretty standard web dev stuff (HTML/CSS/JS and Python/Django). As long as line endings stay Unix, it doesn't matter what machine you use.
I think it's crucial that developers use the environment they work best in. If you can build the same software on any OS, you should get the one you prefer.
At our size, I'm not worried about hardware support, and I'm guessing most people will want a Macbook Pro anyways.
[+] [-] jsabo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spoygg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfaucett|13 years ago|reply
1. "No defined vacation policy" - you do consider this, but I think it will still be a problem actually making people take time off especially if this is just left up in the air for the developers, as a dev you need time off but you're so consumed with your project and its such a part of you that I find myself never doing this unless I know that I have to take 4 weeks or whatever per year, then I can alot time for it. So I think the "loose" idea is good but there probably needs to be a basic timeslot for vacation, or suggestions or something so people don't get burned out.
2. "Company credit card access" - this is another really good idea, but I'm the type of person that feels uncomfortable with this sort of thing (don't know how others are?). Personally, I'd just like to know that hey, you have such and such amount of money for general courses/books per year, if you don't use it, well ok it doesn't get added to your salary but its always there. I don't know that's just my opinion of what I like. Then I feel comfortable, buying resources that aren't %100 percent work related (say a book on Functional Programming, when all I do is build rails apps).
3. "They pick their computer" - yes, dead on, this is a must in my opinion, though if someone picked windows I might actually be apt to deny them - jk. Also I might go so far as to say dual or tri wielding with the monitors is a company mandate.
4. "Let them pick their own email address" - I actually disagree on this one. I think there should be a well defined email schema from the onset such as [email protected] so that you end up with descriptive namespaces for individuals in the company that everyone can remember and looks professional on businesss cards and in to/from headers, not things like [email protected].
5. "Dedicate time and resources to learning." - I agree with just about everything here. I would actually even go further though (haven't tried this, its just a thought), and concretely set asside a time, say Friday afternoons, where no one is allowed to work, but its hacking time, where they can work on side-projects or experiment with new things, just so everyone can stay uptodate, work on their own stuff, and head into the weekends with a good relaxed feeling.
again great list :)
[+] [-] yesimahuman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdkess|13 years ago|reply
Picking your own email address and hostname sounds fine in theory, but as the company grows, having a naming scheme like first initial last name lets you email people easily without having to remember the format that they chose. Plus it means that the first few employees get all of the cool email addresses ([email protected], etc), and it's hard to change emails down the line.
And no vacation policy sounds nice in practice, especially as an employer (we're all adults, be responsible), but it falls apart quickly especially if people are workaholics and don't take vacations. I have trouble taking vacation as it is, with no defined policy, I basically don't. It would be even harder if my boss didn't take vacations. Now, this isn't my employer's fault directly, but I would prefer a defined vacation policy with a no sick day policy (or better yet - "if you're sick at all, don't come to work or you're fired") and an understanding of short term tradeoffs for when you do things like pull all nighters.
Company credit card is great. I'd even go so far as to say tell every person - here's $500 to spend each year making yourself more productive. Then let people (subject to approval) buy whatever they want.
As for a clear salary system - in theory, sounds reasonable, but you have to be flexible with salary since you don't want to lose good developers because your "culture" says you can't pay someone an extra $5k/year. And if you start making exceptions, I think that's worse, since it gets perceived as favoritism. At the same time, that salary talk should happen twice a year, no exceptions. There should also be performance reviews every six months, and the performance reviews and salary conversations should not be the same thing (since otherwise I think people will just wait to answer the question of "am I getting a raise" and ignore the rest).
Quality furniture and office space and pick your own computers - very yes. Again, I'd say - here are some recommended/common setups, but here's $5k (or more) to spend on your office. Also, quiet space is so important, I hate open offices. If you're a small company, you take what you can get, but once you are big, at the very least have pair offices. Distraction due to random noise costs me days of productivity, and I'm generally pretty focused. I have a Herman Miller Embody at work, oh god that chair is awesome.
Snacks - I really like free lunches, not for the financial benefit because I figure it comes out of my salary anyway, but because it means I can get healthy food and I don't have to think about it. Also, get healthy office snacks as well as a bit of junk food.
Hours - I tend to work in long periods of high productivity followed by long periods of low productivity, so my work hours fluctuate a lot. I have friend however that works at a company that is quite strict about 9:30-6:00pm every day (as in, get in slightly before 9:30 ever day, and everyone is out before 6:00pm), which seems reasonable. I think that in a lot of companies where people are at work for 12 hours a day, they're not doing 12 hours of work but filling time to save face. So having never experienced a more strictly regimented day, I think that it might be interesting.
[+] [-] constatino|13 years ago|reply
Exactly. I would respond to this policy by never taking any vacation time ever, or, at the very least, feeling guilty every time I did.
[+] [-] yesimahuman|13 years ago|reply
For the email policy, I see that point. I hope that under 20 employees that won't be an issue considering Gmail auto complete, and mailing lists, but I'm going to have to be careful about it.
I agree with the vacation issue. I wonder if there is a way to encourage people to take any time off they need, but not worry so much about allocating individual days to it? Also, I don't love "earned" vacation as it seems to say we don't trust you enough yet to take vacation (if they are an early employee), and it's annoying having to delay vacation until you've put in an arbitrary amount of hours.
[+] [-] jimsilverman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yesimahuman|13 years ago|reply