

Work with People You Love - wetzler
http://blog.keen.io/post/33237356748/work-with-people-you-love

======
nanijoe
Wait..so you just wrote a long blog post to basically say you like being
friends with your friends? I know you guys just had some kind of launch, but
if you need to drive traffic to your site, you could be a little more creative
with your blog posts. I did read the post though, so maybe you are getting the
desired result.

------
samspot
> but none of the negative things will happen to us because we’re too awesome.

I just wanted to note that the above is the definition of hubris, and exactly
what the people doing EDD (Ego-Driven Development) are thinking:
<http://deliberate-software.com/ego-driven-development>.

Having said that though, I do hope that your team is indeed that awesome and I
wish you success. I would just caution you to think very critically when you
become tempted by the "we're too awesome" line of thought.

~~~
dkador
Maybe I wasn't clear enough when I wrote it, but my intention was to show
that, while I wrote that version of the post, I realized it was stupid (not
just the post, but the idea).

We're working hard to not fall into any of the traps of working with friends.
It's not easy. Who knows if we'll succeed. But we're trying.

~~~
001sky
Good luck, just remember this is the early chapter of your book, and there is
a lot of work still to do for a happy ending. It would be great to read
this/similar post in 5 or ten years at the reunion, etc...

------
biot
What happens when the people you love are no longer passionate about the
product you're building because their interests have grown in a different
direction? Now you're faced with the potential that someone sticks around only
because they love the people but they're burned out by the work and don't want
to face the possibility of doing what is necessary and moving on to another
job where perhaps they don't (yet) love the people there but the job is what
they're passionate about. There's also the issue of scalability. It's great
that you love everybody in your 10 person startup, but how do you scale this
out to build a business with 1000 employees? Short of slipping something in
the Kool-aid, I don't think it's possible.

Another way to approach it is to work with people who are really competent and
who you have an enormous amount of respect for. If, through work, you happen
to form a bond of friendship with them that's great and you can continue to be
friends even if your life takes a different direction. Should that happen, you
can move on to a new job and still look for competence from people you can
respect and build up that sense of camaraderie with a new team. Maybe it will
lead to friendship and love. Maybe you'll not socialize with everyone on the
team but you'll still have massive amounts of respect for their ability to get
the job done that you don't need to feel like you have to love everyone. This
approach does scale out to thousands of employees. If I'm in the same company
as you, I don't have to like you but I should be able to expect that you'll
perform your job competently which will earn my respect.

------
icco
Well written, glad to hear things are going well.

~~~
dkador
Thanks, Nat. :)

------
tisme
You have to go through a couple of crisis situations together before you
really know if you love the people you work with.

~~~
mooreds
Or, an equivalent statement, if the love you have for the folks is strong
enough to survive through the crises. It's easy to love folks when everything
is going swimmingly.

(BTW, I have no idea what crises, if any, the author and their company have
gone through. Maybe that'd be a good post for them?)

------
jeffehobbs
This will end well!

