
Corner Office: Dennis Crowley - topherjaynes
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/business/dennis-crowley-of-foursquare-on-open-lines-of-communication.html?_r=1&ref=business
======
shaufler
I'm an engineering intern at Foursquare. The culture Dennis describes is
accurate.

Dennis holds weekly office hours where anyone at the company can meet up with
him and ask questions or voice concerns. In my first month, I met with him a
couple times and asked him questions about how he raised capital, his
relationships with investors, and his experience with startups. After our
first meeting, he let me know that I could grab coffee with him anytime.
Foursquare really seems like a small startup despite there being 120
employees.

In response to some questions below about how snippets work, it is not
necessary to read the entire company's snippets. It is a Twitter model where
you subscribe to people's feeds. I'm following the exec team, my manager and
other guys on the web-client team, and a couple of my other friends.

I saw that some comments about wanting to work for Foursquare, and I just
thought I'd leave a reminder that we're hiring =)
<https://foursquare.com/jobs/>

------
mgkimsal
Q. Other things you’ve learned?

A. The importance of overcommunicating.

Funny... I've had a friend who's been marked down at multiple companies for
'overcommunicating' - things like reiterating the todo list from a meeting out
to everyone, and including people who couldn't be there but would be impacted,
emailing a group with a question and to make sure everyone understands what
the impact of XYZ will be. Most people _hated_ it. Well, I was fine with it -
I think there should be more of it, and I don't think most people really grok
that in knowledge work, that's all you've got - communication. Making
assumptions or ignoring/forgetting to notify some parties of XYZ have huge
ramifications.

~~~
itcmcgrath
There is overcommunicating and then there is noise. Getting the difference
right is what successful overcommunication is about

~~~
mgkimsal
One can possibly indicate in this case it was 'noise', but constructive
feedback on things like "we don't need to know about X, but we do need to know
about Y" would be helpful.

"Quit sending so many emails!" is about all he'd generally get. In at least
one case, I suspect it was more about control of information than anything
else - when too much info gets to too many people, it's harder to claim
plausible deniability.

~~~
efsavage
"Quit sending so many emails!" means he was sending too many emails to people
who didn't want them. If every message had value to everyone receiving them,
nobody would complain. An unattainable standard. without erring on the side of
not sending useful stuff, but you have a decent margin where people will
ignore your noise because your signal is valuable. Nobody complains about spam
for things they end up buying.

CC'ing a group "just to keep everyone in the loop" is overcommunication.
Pulling out the details that are useful for the whole group, if any, and then
sending followups with additional details to a subset of people is the
effective way to do it. It's a lot of work and it's why so many people who
effortlessly handle in-person communication have trouble with
written/broadcast patterns, they just aren't used to putting the extra work
in.

------
SeoxyS
I find it somewhat sloppy when journalists simply publish the Q&A transcript
of an interview.

What I'm going to miss the most when real journalists aren't around anymore
are the long-form articles and profiles that obviously took care and several
interviews to craft. For example, the recently HN-featured profile of Jack
Dorsey by Wired's Steven Levy[1]:

 _But our discussion is sidetracked when the proprietor, Vincent Fung, starts
a long and complicated explanation of the various tea options. Dorsey—like
Jobs—is interested in Eastern thought, and after listening to a detailed
rundown of the exotic choices, he approves Fung’s suggestion to try a dark and
musty chunk of Pu-erh tea from China’s Yunnan Province. A few minutes later,
Fung appears at the booth with a deep wooden tray and begins a carefully
choreographed ceremony, pouring a continuous stream of hot water over tiny
cups. Then he pours water on top of a lid that partially covers the bowl
containing densely packed cakes of tea. Dorsey watches the ritual and
appreciatively touches his finger to a worn corner of the tray._

This is how an in-person interview is meant to be conveyed to the reader… not
as a transcript.

1: <http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/ff_dorsey/>

~~~
mapgrep
This is absolutely not a simple Q&A transcript being dumped online, I assure
you.

You have no idea how much work goes into something like this.

See the disclaimer at the top where it says the interview was condensed? A lot
of information is hiding behind that disclaimer.

That means that to get these 7 good questions, the writer might easily have
asked 21 questions.

That means that where you are reading 1-3 paragraph answers, the original
answer was easily 10 paragraphs, because people tend to ramble when you ask
them about their jobs, even when they're NOT being interview by the NYT.
(Here's an experiment for you: Ask a friend or colleague one of those
questions, do not interrupt them, in fact appear very interested, and count
how many minutes the answer takes to unspool.)

That means that when you're reading a nice orderly progression of thoughts,
the writer probably had to take bits and pieces from different answers because
the interviewee thought of something later to append to the original answer,
or emailed a clarification later, or reminded himself of something.

That means when you don't see words like "uh" and "um" and "like" and "I mean"
and "I think" and "you know?", and when you don't see sentences that trail off
into nothingness, and when you don't see run-on sentences, and when you don't
see non sequiturs, that's because the writer has carefully removed them.

That means the writer doesn't mention that it took three hours, easily, to
transcribe a 45 minute sit down, and more time for the follow up to clarify
and fact check words that were mumbled or inaudible and not in the notes.

You don't want to call something like this "sloppy" unless you know what
actually goes into it. You know how non-programmers often assume that very
simple, easy-to-use software was similarly easy to make? How they don't think
about the edge conditions that turn something that SEEMS like an easy two-week
project into a three month project
(<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000356.html>)? You know how
people around here are always saying that non technical people make bad tech
CEOs because they don't understand the inherent and often hidden challenges of
writing code? Well, other fields are like that too, including journalism.

(Disclaimer, I write these sorts of Q&As myself.)

------
maayank
In moments like that I really wish there was a comment from a throwaway
account of someone working in Foursquare telling how it looks from the side of
the employees.

~~~
coops
i'm a site reliability engineer at foursquare sf, and i think it's very
accurate. dennis travels to our office frequently and takes the time to meet
with each of us individually, even those of us who work very far away from
feature-land. when we're meeting i feel super comfortable saying "this sucks
and we ought to fix it." mostly we discuss organizational issues; i generally
air technical issues in similar meetings with harry (our eng lead, posted
above,) because making engineering work is harry's whole job.

i've worked at high-profile startups with founders who are very media-visible
before and dennis is pretty special in my opinion. he seems to genuinely
believe that all of us employees are important to making foursquare the best
product it can be.

~~~
slurgfest
If only "this sucks and we ought to fix it" were not so pervasively condemned
in US business culture, it would be much more pleasant to work in; and there
are a lot of things which wouldn't be so broken.

~~~
coops
similarly, engineers who won't criticize or endure criticism of their own work
are seriously poisonous for a company.

------
SeanDav
Wow, I want to work at Foursquare!

These are such great ideas. I get jealous when I see articles like this as I
have never had the privilege of working in such an environment. Of course as
the company gets bigger it is going to be tough stopping fiefdoms and silos
but they are surely on the right track.

~~~
harryh
Are you a programmer? Have a resume I can look at? harryh [at] foursquare.com

------
nrmehta
From my experience, his tips are very practical. In particular, if any of you
end are founders / leaders or end up being founders / leaders, I can't
overemphasize how important it is to communicate and repeat your message,
strategy, goals, etc. As an organization gets larger, unless you're bored of
your message yourself, it probably hasn't sunk in for others.

------
jetsnoc
Snippets are such a simple but powerful idea. Has anyone open sourced a
project or created a SaaS tool for this idea? I would love to implement this
within my organization.

~~~
harryh
Here's the code we use to run the snippets system at foursquare:

<https://github.com/kushal/snippets>

~~~
nigelk
This is awesome. As an ex-Googler at a startup, I've been wanting to re-
implement OSS snippets for a while now. Checking it out!

------
alpine
One of the smartest interview pieces I've read in a long time. I don't think
you can ever over-estimate the benefit of forcing seemingly non-functionally
aligned people to sit next to each other. Forcing your enterprise to build
social connections is analogous to neurons forming new paths as a novel skill
is mastered.

------
JeanTouman
Foursquare is not useful though. I don't know anyone who really uses it
actively.

~~~
rdl
The core checkin functionality is "fun", but not useless, and has a really
awesome side effect: Foursquare explore. Seeing where my friends have checked
in is a better way to find new restaurants and other businesses than anything
else right now. Yelp should be useful for this, but for a variety of reasons,
is not.

