
Creating a Great Place to Work - pulleasy
http://maxlynch.com/blog/hiring/
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edw519
_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.

~~~
yesimahuman
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.

~~~
div
I worked in an open floor plan office for 8 years. The second best results
invariably came from projects in which my 3-4 man team claimed a meeting room
and closed the door. The best results came from working from home, where I
have a private office.

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Spooky23
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 John.Smith3@example.com"? 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.

~~~
yesimahuman
Thanks for the suggestions, I will definitely keep all of this in mind as we
work through some of these things.

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molbioguy
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.

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jaggederest
A significant number of these things are moot if you let people telecommute.

I telecommute full time, and there is no substitute for the flexibility and
accessibility.

~~~
yesimahuman
I should have added to the list that telecommuting is just fine. In fact we
built the company basically through Campfire chat :)

~~~
jaggederest
I personally think there's a huge difference between "you can work from home
if you want" - this is not really telecommuting, it's flex time - and
"anywhere you are is your office, anywhere in the world".

It's one of my life goals to live on every continent at some point.

~~~
yesimahuman
Yea, I agree. For now, we want to keep people local if possible mainly because
I think it's just more fun to have people you can go grab drinks or lunch
with, and fun is one of the biggest reasons I enjoy running a software
company.

I've worked remotely before with great people and it works really well when
done right, but it's not something I personally enjoy all that much.

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orangethirty
My short list:

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
Great list. I am not opposed to small offices, but I wonder how to do it in a
way that it's affordable?

It seems the only option is to build them yourself inside the office, since
many office spaces are pre-built for cube farms.

~~~
orangethirty
You do make a good point. I can't really say much except that I'm a big fan of
drywalls. I will cut and paste dry wall to my hearts content and build myself
a nice office anywhere (with door, of course).

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garrynewman
What about hours? Should they be vigourously enforced 9-5? Or should people be
trusted to get it done?

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chrisbennet
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.

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rutigers
"They pick their computer." Love this point.

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.

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tushark
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.

~~~
yesimahuman
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.

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brudgers
These are nice to haves.

The must have is don't be an asshole.

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keithpeter
_"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.

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d--b
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.

~~~
yesimahuman
Author here :) Thanks for the feedback!

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.

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Spoygg
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.

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jfaucett
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
firstname.lastname@company.com 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
cooldever@company.com.

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
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.

~~~
dmooney1
Just to provide a counter-point on the vacation policy, I worked at a start-up
where this kind of policy worked just fine. Most people took a two-week
vacation at some point in the summer, and nobody worked between Christmas and
New Years. Other days off, usually in ones and twos, whenever needed were
always allowed. It worked out great.

~~~
jfaucett
I'm curious, b/c conceptually I like the idea of no fixed vacation, just take
it when you need it. How was this handled in the company or established in the
culture? Did the bosses do the same thing? I could imagine if the heads set
the example most might follow suite.

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mdkess
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
(dave@example.com, 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.

~~~
yesimahuman
Author here. Thank you so much for the feedback.

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.

~~~
mdkess
For 20 people, you don't need policies at all. But probably you're not
planning on being a 20 person company forever, and the more people, the harder
it is to change things.

As for vacation, why not - you get 2 weeks vacation as a signing bonus, plus 3
weeks/year. This accrues up to X months. Seems to solve all of the problems.
If you want to stick with the no vacation policy, assuming you're the founder,
it means that you have to take long, extended vacations. If you want your
employees to be comfortable taking two weeks off, you have to take two weeks
off and make people know that you're taking two weeks off (and not work those
two weeks, at least as far as people can tell). There are always deadlines,
always important meetings, and I find it impossible to justify taking an
arbitrary amount of time off with no guideline. The point of vacation time
isn't trust, it's to set that guideline - I am here to work, but I need to
know what the expectations are. You can deal with the outliers as they come up
- if one of your good employees wants to take two months off in the summer,
you guys'll work something out.

Then I think having no sick day policy ("come to work sick and you're fired")
and a flexible work from home policy makes this less about beancounting and
more about taking time off to energize. Everyone loses a few days a year to
appointments, a cold, a sleepless night, etc., and hates having to take those
out of their vacation days (or are forced to lie about being sick).

~~~
lmm
3 weeks/year is what passes for lots of holiday in the US? Wow. I took 31 days
this year (not counting public holidays) and it was less than I'd've liked.

~~~
DougWebb
In the US vacation time is in addition to public holidays. Most companies have
10 holiday days off per year. Salaried employees usually get a minimum of two
weeks of vacation time on top of that, which often includes sick days. Extra
weeks are earned by long-time employees. So you start at 20 days and get to 25
and 30 over some number of years with the same company. It's also often
possible to negotiate the starting amount when you're hired, if it's not your
first job.

Most good companies/managers, at least in the software industry, also
recognize that developers often work overtime and/or odd hours, so when you're
sick or can't work for some other reason you can usually "make it up" by
working off-hours. That way you can save your vacation time for when you're
actually on vacation.

~~~
lmm
>Salaried employees usually get a minimum of two weeks of vacation time on top
of that, which often includes sick days. Extra weeks are earned by long-time
employees. So you start at 20 days and get to 25 and 30 over some number of
years with the same company

I said not counting public holidays, i.e. 31 days holiday + 8 (I think?) days
public holidays. If you start at two weeks, isn't that 10 days rather than 20?

And I wouldn't even dream of including sick days in that. When you're sick you
get the day off, paid, without affecting your holidays; I think that's a legal
requirement, but if it isn't it's certainly industry standard (If you're sick
when you've already taken a holiday you can claim another day off in lieu,
though that's a little more complex).

The US just seems to overwork immensely from where I stand.

~~~
cookiecaper
The US just has an attitude more consistent with upstarts/bootstrappers. While
it'd be great if we could all afford to work only for 10 months of the year
and to pay our employees for 2 months+ of time with no productive output,
that's not how it works when you're a small business scraping by. Once you get
to the F500, of course, things change, but mandating vacation time makes it
really difficult for small companies to afford new hires.

Most people do not "overwork immensely".

------
jimsilverman
very reasonable rules for a one-employee company. will look forward to hearing
about how these policies hold up as the company grows.

~~~
yesimahuman
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.

