Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

My first software engineering job was with a big aerospace company about 20 years ago. Back then, budgets were big and the culture was completely different. Even the lowest peon had a huge cubicle with lots of desk space and privacy. Standups were not a thing and Agile wasn’t on the radar. We had lots of time to do anything we were assigned and never had to do much reporting aside from weekly meetings. We all had a general sense of schedule but it wasn’t rushed at all. We also didn’t have rhe always-in communication tools like Slack. Phone calls and face-to-face were it. This all made for a very relaxed environment where no one felt rushed and we had time and space to contemplate and concentrate. This is where I learned and created the most. I basically taught myself Perl, Unix (we had SPARC x-terms), Java, bash, csh, ksh, SQL, Javascript and web application development, and so much more, all of which I still remember to this day. I was happy and relaxed and pretty much always looked forward to learning and exploring more every day. Clearly this type of environment works well for some people, and it certainly did for me. I credit these early years to my success. Fast forward 20 years and I am in a completely different environment - open office plans that encourage collaboration but also distraction, Agile tools that promote micro-management down to the number of minutes you spend on a task, daily stand-ups (sometimes multiple per day if you’re involved in several projects), and constant reporting to management, SCRUM masters and POs. Oh and chat tools. These constant interruptions often make it impossible to truly do creative and deeply thoughtful work. Most of what I do is rushed and measured and we are always analyzing what we can more efficiently and quickly. Responsiveness to messages are also scrutinized. Oh and all the meetings - Sprint planning, retrospectives, reciews, backlog grooming, etc. I estimate that most of what I do these days is a lot of administrative busy work and useless overhead, which is definitely not conducive to doing what I believe I do best - write code.

A top-notch VP of Engineering who knew when and how to reduce scope (because he was an active contributor to the code base) and was also one of the best coders in the room.<p>1) Pair programming, with the VP stopping by every couple of days asking &quot;where are you guys stuck&quot; and would actively try to solve our problem.<p>2) Story prioritization - each PM would write product stories for the backlog in an effort to get them in the next sprint. The same VP (above) would review each of those stories in front of the PMs and developers. If it were really lazily written, the PM was shamed, it was thrown out, and could be resubmitted for the next week. Developers got to ask questions, add tidbits regarding prior work that may need to be studied to complete the story.<p>3) If a bug made it out in the release, it was no-one&#x27;s fault. Everyone worked as quickly as possible to either create a patch or roll back the feature completely.<p>P.S. That VP of Engineering is Andres Camacho. He&#x27;s in San Francisco. And he&#x27;s amazing. Work with him if you have a chance. He&#x27;s well known for hiring Jr developers, training them via pairing with them intensively, getting them up to speed quickly and having them contribute meaningful code within a few days. He&#x27;s now the CTO of Better Therapeutics.

Looking back over thirty years, and picking out the projects where I think I&#x27;ve done the best work for the greatest lengths of time, the common characteristics seem to be a quiet working environment, a high level of confidence and trust among the people working together (together with a level of competence that justifies it), clearly-communicated objectives, and substantial freedom to choose how to achieve those objectives.<p>I saw good situations in a couple of large companies, but also in some small startups. Private offices or common offices for small teams (2-4 people) with sound barriers to keep things quiet were the best physical environments. My experience with remote work has been uniformly good.<p>The best psychological environments were ones in which teams developed confidence and trust in each others&#x27; capabilities and judgments, and in which leadership was trusted both to make reasonable strategic decisions, and to treat people fairly.<p>I&#x27;ve also seen a variety of bad situations. Major contributors to loss of productivity include excessive noise and distraction in the workplace, too many interruptions, oppressive micromanagement, loss of trust and confidence among colleagues or in leadership, too much or too little process, anxiety over the solvency of the company, infighting and factionalism, sudden, frequent changes in product objectives and business strategies, loss of leaders&#x27; credibility, and sketchy business practices. All of these things impair productivity.

No company at all.<p>My best work I&#x27;ve done between 5:30AM and 7:00AM on my home machine before I got ready for work. The code I have created there runs hundreds of websites and causes me less than 5 trouble tickets a year.<p>My home computer sits in a mud room full of boots and heavy coats where no one bothers me first thing in the morning. It&#x27;s a littler cooler than the house. I drink tea and espresso. There is no phone, or IM, or anything too distracting (the occasional woodpecker on the gutters).<p>My home computer is from 2009, only the video-card is upgraded. I run Windows 7. I take a long time and tinker to figure out how things are going to work. No rush. I build logging and error handling first, then functionality. No users requests or specs from management. No influence on direction from management. Management gets (mostly) finished code. In every case so far they didn&#x27;t know what I was doing and I presented the solution once I felt it was solid.<p>Somehow I get away with writing no documentation.<p>I target good. Perfect is truly the enemy of the good. I write code I can hand to juniors with a hour or two of explanation or that seniors can pick up and use and ask minimal questions. No rocket science. This has made it so I don&#x27;t have to support developers, either.<p>My one mistake, or maybe, regret, is writing things for me then giving to my employer for free (I do take company time to integrate it into the stack). These solutions have made my professional life invaluably better, but I sometimes wonder if if there was money to be made. But then, I have enough money to live okay, so I&#x27;m not too worried about past opportunities lost.

My current one.<p>I work as the only dev for a small manufacturing company.<p>I work alone, in a big quiet office with nice hardware, a comfortable desk and I get to choose all technical choices and set dev priorities.<p>My boss is ridiculously smart (hard science background) and trusts me to do what I’m good at while he does what he’s good at.<p>I work 9-5 every day.<p>It’s basically programmer heaven.

My most joyful (work wise), efficient and productive 5 weeks ever were: * in a remote place, visiting and living with my grandparents * in a village with little civilization but tons of nature around * when for a break I could just go outside house, hike around the barn, watch village folks going about their business in the farm or around the kettle * with big time zone difference from the rest of the team that allowed only occasionally for 1 hour of overlap to sync up * with my wife being away for her studies in a different country (told ya it was joyful only work-wise!!) with fixed limited hour to catch up on a phone.<p>In those 5 weeks I’ve built the major part of the scalable distributed OLAP Cube that had proved to be very simple, robust and reliable and was still in use to support telemetry of over hundred of customers after 5 years.<p>The biggest distractions were a cat, incredibly beautiful rain showers, and warmest ever discussions at the dinner table.

I worked at a national laboratory. There were 125 staff to one group leader and one assistant group leader, and they had their own projects too. Everybody who worked together was in the same hallway. Real offices, two people each. Zero remote. Core hours. Gym, cafe, and doctor on site. There were no meetings, just presentations you could go to. I didn’t use my calendar. Project matching was a natural process; you just had to report a rough fraction of time for each thing you were working on. Performance conversations 1:1 once a quarter with group leader based on feedback collected from project leads. 1-page writeup once a year. Projects always require senior staff to work with junior staff. Constant in-house education in scientific computing. Full access to journals and site licenses for just about any software. In general, you knew everybody that controlled any resource you might want access to.<p>Really didn’t value that place enough.

At a studio I worked at once, two others and myself were assigned to a new project. Since we were the only ones working on the project, we got permission to clear out a storage room and convert it into an office.<p>It was just the three of us in a decent sized room and I feel that my work satisfaction and productivity was double what it was anywhere else in the open plan office space. There were very few distractions, but our office was open-door and just off a commonly used hallway so we weren’t hiding. We had enough space for a whiteboard and a 4th desk that we used for reviewing work together.<p>A few months later one of the managers saw what we’d done and decided he wanted it for his personal office. We went back to open plan :(

I don&#x27;t think it is so much any of those things that enable your best work, it is having a problem that requires innovation, in a company that allows innovation (probably because it will die without it, so a startup), and where the skills required are especially suited to you.<p>That said probably the companies that provoked my best work where ones that<p>1. I had a personal investment in<p>2. There were parts of what we worked on that I found intellectually interesting.<p>2. had small teams and we were not afraid to argue for days about how to do something, and arguments were clear.<p>3. technical people that worked together sat together.<p>The places I did my worst work<p>1. Hated the concept and what we were doing.<p>2. Just cashing a paycheck (I have also done good work just cashing a paycheck so not sure how important it is)<p>3. Even if the teams were small the tasks the team handled were split up in such a way that nobody really had any input on anybody else&#x27;s area.<p>4. Argument just did not make any headway on anything. If someone had more power in an area you let them have their way because it was a waste of time saying anything.<p>5. if you sat with the people you worked with it was almost an afterthought.

XP: open office, promiscuous pairing, very little remote work, 4-6 teammates, 2-3 30-minute breaks throughout the day to do whatever, regular lunch n learns, honest retrospectives, continuous deployment, powerful tools (Haskell, Elm, postgresql), daily company-wise “standup” with 70 people that averages 5-10 minutes, bi-monthly team get-togethers to play games and watch movies, regular lunches together, good code review practices, entire team constantly striving to improve.<p>Software engineers somewhat involved with most relevant business decisions. We are empowered to respectfully question decisions.

This was before we grew to 200+, but the best snapshot was:<p>- &lt;80 person team (total); ~60% engineers<p>- 0 product managers: design and engineering are equally empowered to make the site nice within general business&#x2F;product definitions defined by GM who would constantly get excited about the work you showed her, making you feel good about yourself and your work<p>- 0 project managers: business understands that there is no magic formula for delivering products that haven&#x27;t been built yet and so long as we try our best to hit dates and cut scope as needed, it&#x27;s on us to track our progress and determine priorities<p>- gm, cto, and head of hr all supportive of growing team and individual members in a non-political way<p>- politically-driven employees (typically a head of sales or marketing) shut down and churn out quickly<p>- engineers talk directly with customer service<p>- engineers perform rounds helping out in support forums<p>- domain specialists, but no fences. i might be a web engineer, but if there&#x27;s a sql query i feel compelled to optimize, nobody is going to stop me.<p>- company regularly interacts with, and hosts local events for, an engaged user base. engineers actually end up having in person conversations with our users, gathering honest feedback for improvements while simultaneously being told how great the product they contribute to is overall<p>- relaxed hours (&quot;you&#x27;re an adult; we trust you to get your work done&quot;)<p>- when dining out or getting drinks, even paying by cash a large group is able to come up with the right amount of money, with no one person needing to chip in more than necessary<p>- anyone in the company can deploy the site with a single chat room command

My current one. The company treats people like...well people. -transparent communication -soliciting feedback often -an ethos of &quot;take care of yourself, your family, then the company&quot;, manifesting in flexible WFH situations -lots of investment in personal development &#x2F; growth -an emphasis on bridging gaps &#x2F; empathizing &#x2F; assuming positive intent in working with others<p>At pretty much every other company I&#x27;ve ever worked at, I&#x27;ve always felt that if I inconvenienced the company at all, it basically wasn&#x27;t going to happen unless I brought a strong business case. Company always came first. Conversely here, I feel like it&#x27;s a balance. If I want to do X, my manager &#x2F; others will make an effort to find a business need that matches that. There&#x27;s a very generous (paid) maternity leave policy.<p>When you like your manager and you feel like your interests are aligned with the company&#x27;s, and you feel like it&#x27;s a little more relational, that&#x27;s when I do my best work. I&#x27;ve been looking for this for a long time, and I&#x27;m thrilled to be here.

One of the main game changer for me has been having a great Product Manager. I went a lot of time with not-stellar PMs, and some time with no PM at all, and having a new PM who is great at his job lately have made a huge difference.<p>What&#x27;s so great about this PM? (I won&#x27;t try to generalize, I&#x27;m too inexperienced for generalizations)<p>- he doesn&#x27;t code, yet he listens to our expertise and act on it<p>- he doesn&#x27;t half-ass features, he takes the time to reach out to customers and prototype<p>- he shields us from upper management<p>- he respects our time, and actively prevent outside interruptions<p>- he is careful about when we get blocked&#x2F;slower, yet he doesn&#x27;t try to micro-manage<p>- he doesn&#x27;t balk away from the boring and ungrateful work<p>Despite having no say in his recruitment, I am glad my company decided to get him on-board (despite no previous formal PM job)

When I had a visual shield between my screen and people walking around.<p>When there is enough space that some one else&#x27;s conversations did not cut through my headphones which do not play music by just cancel noise.<p>When what is the problem is articulated well (I do not mean details for a task, I am ok with a problem with no known solution but there needs to be a common articulation of success..)<p>When my co-workers are emotionally secure enough to have a discussion where any and every idea is open for a challenge. I hate to say this but &quot;disagree but commit&quot; is a good mantra as long as &quot;disagreement&quot; is not used against you, actively or passively. I burn more energy navigating my path around egg shells and consequently have less for what I need to do.

We are 100% remote with an optional co-working space that is available if you ever want to work at an “office” environment.<p>Project is managed mostly through airtable with quarterly goals with weekly’s and daily’s (not standup) to check on progress. Then we have a company&#x2F;team wide call every tues for the weekly brief.<p>All the above enabled me to have the best environment by then investing in my home office. A space that has a good desk (multitable sit&#x2F;stand), chair (aeron), and good lighting, not to mention a beautiful machine (iMac Pro).<p>The issues that followed were more of the focus issues when doing work at home, so I got a pomodoro clock which then made everything seamless.

I guess this depends on the person, but for me- My boss 100% hands off on my day to day work.<p>I can chose what I work on for the day, week, month, or Quarter. I have my work area, but within that I have 100% freedom to figure out what I need to do- the only thing I need to do is to be able to justify it. I can select the tickets I want to work on, areas to improve, initiatives to take up, or software to build.<p>Also, the core business drive of measuring and qualitating your work. So, you can see the impact you are having on the business (positive or negative- NOT in a way that affects your job, but in a way that you can say &quot;I did X which made Y faster, causing a 3% growth in click-though rates).<p>But I do wish I had a more private workplace. Hexes are better then the nightmare of open offices, and I work on a quiet floor, but sometimes I wish I had a door I could close.

Amazing it has been this long: back in &#x27;91 I was working for Philips during the development heyday of CD-ROMs. I was in the CD-I division, basically CD-ROMs with a special file format for streaming media. A Dutch executive was sent to the States to &quot;show the yanks how to produce&quot; because that division had only managed to pull off production disasters to date. Of course, the American management wanted this guy to fail, so he was assigned a tiny team of 1 staff developer (me) a medium skilled contract developer, two graphic artists, and two production assistants. We were all recent hires, and were given 30-days to produce a product that all other productions were typically given a year. This Dutch guy was a gift from heaven. He collected us into a small office suite, with programming, art, and editing each in separate rooms of two, a shared space each opened into, and best of all, people had to travel through his office to get to us, so people could not bother us without his knowledge. But the real key to his management style was an idea he called &quot;interfaces&quot;: he believed people did their best work when free, but working towards a well defined interface that their work hands off to the next person in a production flow. As long as you respect the needs of the people before and after you in the work flow, everything goes smooth. And that is accomplished by teaching those before and after you the importance of your work and why it is critical to the projects flow. This idea sounds simplistic, but it embeds &quot;care of process&quot; where, and only where, it is required. Needless to say, our 30-day deadline was met, the production team went on to create a fairly big award winning series of &quot;Ken Burns style&quot; documentaries, and that Dutch executive graduated to become the CEO of global Philips: J.P. Isbouts.

Working from home as a contractor on a team of two making a conditional access system from scratch. No bullshit, no politics. Just code and happy customers. I wrote complex software all by myself which worked nearly perfect and continues to serve hundreds of thousands (probably more now) of digital cable subscribers. My friend&#x2F;co-worker&#x2F;architect did a great job with his stuff and mediated the boss&#x27;s crazy whims.<p>I&#x27;m still owed $14k for my work, which I&#x27;ll probably never see, but I&#x27;m proud of the work I did. It gave me something to talk about in interviews and probably made me more money than I&#x27;m owed.

I don&#x27;t want to be managed. Tell me the objective and give me the freedom to meet it for you. I&#x27;m smart. You don&#x27;t hire smart people and tell them what to do. You hire smart people and let them tell you what to do.

- allow flexibility to work from home<p>- those who like open office can sit together, but for the rest, provide a semi-isolated quiet&#x2F;dark area to concentrate in and a whiteboard.<p>- plenty of conference rooms.<p>- if expecting to work with new tech&#x2F;framework, allow reasonable time to learn during work hours. - allow time for documenting<p>- allocate time for fixing tech debt every sprint<p>- provide training on the product being built<p>- give good insight into product decisions<p>- if unexpected work has to be added mid-sprint, pull something else out!<p>- acknowledged that when someone worked all weekend to finish something that they get a bonus day off some other time<p>- keep process meetings to minimum<p>- when a developer brings up a security flaw, take him&#x2F;her seriously

I think my answer here is a bit different from most, and that might have to do with a different definition of &quot;enabled&quot;. Yes, I <i>do</i> my best work in an isolated, quiet, focused environment. However, I would say that this work was actually <i>enabled</i> in a different environment- and that is the environment where I got to pair program with an existing expert in a system. The amount that I learned - both in breadth and in depth from these sessions - has accelerated my learning enough that I would say that I would have been unable to perform my best work without that assistance.<p>This environment requires that both participants have plenty of humility, openness, and patience, but when it works, it can be priceless.<p>MPJ has a long, but relevant video on this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qe1ZAy2yNvE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qe1ZAy2yNvE</a>

At the macro (yearly) level I am most productive with:<p>1) condensed higher intensity blocks followed by larger breaks<p>2) distinct &quot;seasons&quot; of work that differ in projects&#x2F;pace<p>At the micro (day-to-day) level:<p>3) no logging of hours<p>#1 and #2 are a product of the academic calendar. I find the regular 9-to-5 work week paradoxically draining. I&#x27;ll trade a good chunk of my weekends and evenings for longer breaks between &quot;ON&quot; periods.<p>As for #3, one company I worked for simply trusted that you&#x27;d put in your 40 hours a week. It was more flexible and quite simply <i>freeing</i>. If I were in a good flow state I might work late to finish up a feature, then sleep in the next morning (provided there were no meetings). All without the tedium of counting quarter-hours.

None? When I used to work in open source for fun, you could take all the time in the world to develop the right solution. People communicated freely remotely over irc and mailing lists. Very little red tape. Easy to feel like you&#x27;re actually contributing to something. You get to pick what you work on and either clean up little things or tackle big projects. All necessary information is public and easy to find by asking the group.<p>Really you just need fewer barriers to doing work, and to make it easier to find and publish information. A group consensus or product owner can decide if work gets merged or refactored.

The best work I ever did involved a large collection of computers admin&#x27;ed by some serious f-ing idiots. They&#x27;d break that system in every conceivable way, every day of the week. So, I ended up writing a seriously fault-tolerant piece of software that could make forward progress on my users&#x27; problem no matter what. It turned out to be glorious.<p>Not much beyond that, except that my users had a clear need, and I was given time to do the work. Had a private office, but that mattered little.<p>My moral: Sometimes you really can make lemonade out of lemons. Maybe the torrent of shit raining down on you is a gift sometimes.

Working from home, while having a 10 min daily standup voice call. I work with colleagues but mostly on my own stuff, so I get a lot of freedom to handle things.

Honestly? When my bosses were on extended leave and I had little oversight and could do whatever the hell I wanted. I got so much done.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;benjiweber.co.uk&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;17&#x2F;modern-extreme-programming&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;benjiweber.co.uk&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;17&#x2F;modern-extreme-prog...</a> XP teams, with pair and mob programming. Spacious team areas with big TVs for coding in pairs or mobs. 20% time for learning and to foster bottom-up innovation <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;benjiweber.co.uk&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;29&#x2F;gold-cards&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;benjiweber.co.uk&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;29&#x2F;gold-cards&#x2F;</a><p>Worth noting all these practices can be done remotely too <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cucumber.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;inclusive-benefits-of-mob-programming" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cucumber.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;inclusive-benefits-of-mo...</a><p>Also notable what was absent. No synchronous blocking code reviews. No branching at all, just continuous deployment of small, safe changes. No need for standups or design meetings when mobbing. Estimates unnecessary when teams become good at slicing things small.

Well managed code reviews. I care little for open spaces, slacks or deadlines. Code review done by peers with good faith and deep knowledge is the only thing that moved the needle and forced me to rise up as a developer.

Small team, offices for developers, open door for free to walk in to chat, close door for don&#x27;t bother, lots of whiteboards, ah hoc discusson, weekly team planning meeting on Monday, weekly release&#x2F;resolution meeting on Thursday after lunch, release and recovery from fuckup on Friday.

I work in an open office environment. This is great for rapidly communicating with co-workers and having people eavesdrop and chime in when necessary. However, this can be a big impediment to productivity for some people.<p>What has worked for me to facilitate my best work is to reserve a meeting room to myself for one or two hour slots during the week. This allows me to close the door, put my back to the window and get focused. What&#x27;s great about this is this limits visual distractions, restricts uninvited visitors, and reduces auditory distractions (I will usually wear headphones and listen to non-lyric music).<p>Often I find that I will get more work done in this period of time than I would if I was sitting at my desk.

My best work was enabled by a work from home role with clear product goals but wide latitude on on technical decision-making. The teams were active in good code review, kept our chat channels from being silent all day, and were confident enough in their abilities and trusted in others on the team enough to ask for advice when needed. Technical decisions were largely left up to whoever is doing the work, but major architectural changes would involve either one person presenting a proposal for review or brainstorming sessions with a small group.

First one and a half years at my current company which was (maybe still is) a startup but provided me with proper cubicles where I could concentrate and work while also providing me with a process (or lack of it) startups often are supposed to have that I could reach up to even CTO or CEO pretty much whenever I wanted to. Or if I wanted to make some change or do something different or new, I didn&#x27;t have to go through a chain of command, I just used to meet with whoever were the stakeholders with a short notice in a very casual to the point short meeting or huddle. The place had nap rooms, gym, shower rooms (which I used to use everyday because I would play 2 hours of badminton before office), and people used to come there at 9-10am and leave by 5-6pm. It had a separate hall for TT and foosball which were not used aggressively.<p>The new team however is a place which prides itself in having the &quot;startup culture&quot;. It&#x27;s in a different building and it has TT and foosball tables (pretty much never free) right next to our work desks which are like places where everybody sits everywhere and I literally had to fight with people to ensure that my &quot;spot&quot; remains &quot;my&quot; spot. People start coming at 11-130am and keep leaving till 11pm - 12pm and you are often expected to stay back if there&#x27;s &quot;dependency&quot; and if you start pulling a 10-6 you are literally looked down upon. This team loves to talk about working like this. Productivity is hitting rock bottom. I know it turned into a rant but that&#x27;s how I feel. Yes, I am interviewing but only at MNCs :|

I&#x27;m still figuring things out. Last job was at a big 4 consultancy doing CMS work, current job is at ~1500 employee software company doing a mix mobile and web dev.<p>Agile definitely feels better than waterfall, but it&#x27;s also made me appreciate why it goes wrong so easily. You have to be willing to experiment with your process often, and retros have to have the ability to get brutal if things aren&#x27;t working.<p>Regular releases (every two weeks or so) are important. They help to reduce scope creep and get you faster feedback. The trick is tweaking what a &#x27;release&#x27; is. Having the ability to do targeted, beta or pilot releases helps you get things out more quickly without scaring the rest of your users or screwing up of there are bugs.<p>Pairing is useful, but there is a tendency in our team to say &#x27;oh, there&#x27;s not many cards left in the current release, let me pair with you&#x27;. That&#x27;s just wasting time. Pairing should only be for knowledge sharing or speeding up difficult code.<p>Slicing tasks is very hard. I think it&#x27;s better if they&#x27;re sliced vertically (implementing a feature end to end) as opposed to horizontally (you write the react, I&#x27;ll write the API, and we&#x27;ll meet in the middle). Horizontal slicing leads to knowledge slios, implementation mix-ups and can also lead to very small cards which means you&#x27;re constantly context switching.

8 people in a basement. B2B product. Everyone in a room. I heard our technical services person take the calls. &quot;Do you see an Apple on the back?&quot;. Understood the product through listening to our sales guys talk to people. There was a fair bit of chatter and we just burned through ideas and stuff. Solid traction and good growth.<p>Mmm-mmm. We grew past that, but that was the dream. Just sitting around a table building product with great visibility into the customer&#x27;s experience. Gold.

Building my own company has been one of the most rewarding professional experiences ever. Both Mobile Jazz (7 years old now) and Bugfender (3 years old now) have accomplished to build a team of great engineers, but most importantly great _people_. Together we build challenging products, be it our own or for our customers. We care about what we do, we&#x27;re able to learn from each other, we have flexible schedule and location independence... what else can I ask for?

My best experiences, as I think about it, tend to have these patterns:<p>- No Slack for non remote<p>Slack is cool, but I remember thinking that if I needed to talk to someone, it&#x27;s over email or in-person. This really encouraged face to face or email conversation. There was also Skype for remote workers, but if you&#x27;re not doing remote, you could kill Slack. Now that I think about it, Slack is more of a vitamin than a pain killer for non-remote organizations. Slack is great for remote though and love it.<p>- No Agile<p>Ah, I remember when I had my first job using Agile. It was cool the first few weeks and that was it. Again, it&#x27;s not a pain killer, it&#x27;s a vitamin. I had the best time ever just sitting in meetings on Tuesday mornings to demo everything in person then do code review with my CTO after. Talk with the whole team including marketing on what we&#x27;d work on. I loved it. No agile, was completely in the know and performing.<p>- Support with Tools<p>It sucks not having the right tools to do the job. Receiving the appropriate hardware, desk, and software has always been useful and makes me happy to come into the office. It really sucks when you wake up, look at your amazing at home desk, then go to a lousy work desk. Bling out the work desk. You can do anything from getting a top end work computer, a great monitor, an eGPU (may actually save a company money from AWS bills), a DAC&#x2F;AMP (cause devs usually have a thing for headphones and the budget for great ones), or a desk goes up and down and has memory settings and it&#x27;s fast.<p>- Minimum Friction<p>If you get told you need to change up your landing page, change up the tooling, or do a big refactor on something, always take it seriously. Some people marry a concept or an ideal and it can often cause friction between the team. Giving up the consistency and letting others use what best let&#x27;s them get their job done should be given time and thought. All in all: be fluid with company practices and not letting a &quot;mono-culture&quot; take root is usually best.<p>My best experiences have been when a single employee can happily recommend a new way that could radically change the initial experience of a customer or a company culture. The fluidity maximized sales and development.<p>- Wrap up<p>We have so much now with tools that can be categorized as pain killer or vitamin. My best recommendation is to have less vitamins and more pain killers.<p>Note: This is just me though. I know a lot of other people have different ways they prefer to work. This is just me.

When I was an intern at Big Bank, I was literally put into the printer room. Hardly anyone used the printer&#x2F;copy machine so I was left alone in there for the most part, other than my boss peeking in once in a while to make sure I was still breathing. The door closed and there were no windows.<p>It was the most productive I&#x27;ve ever been. The code I wrote was mostly garbage, but I got my reps in that summer and learned how to program.

When I compare the jobs I’ve had, I would say the first ever job I had as a freelancer was best. It wasn’t for a particularly sexy, high-profile company in the IT sector. It wasn’t a company that used particularly interesting technology. It wasn’t a place with young, high-energy employees. But what I really enjoyed was the opportunity to work independently as the sole programmer on the particular project I was assigned to. I managed my own time, decided how to structure my work and deliverables, and coordinated with domain experts on my own. It wasn’t until I finished that project and moved on to another with a larger (over-staffed) team, a lot of written requirements and a dedicated architect that I realized how I prefer to work. I felt so productive before and ended up in the tar pit. Where I had time before to learn on the job _and_ be productive at the same time, suddenly there wasn’t enough hours in the day for all the meetings, requirements reading and planning.

This is tough since I have changed careers three times, but i have found the remote work I do to be highly effective for me. It’s my first software job and I’ve been good about managing my time and delivering successfully.<p>I don’t get micromanaged but have clear goals that are set forth.<p>The only problem I’ve faced is occasionally unclear communication with other coworkers; mostly because I’m still getting used to some of the jargon and need to phrase my questions correctly.<p>Some coworkers use English as a second language too, so that can be a slight barrier; fortunately my experience as a language teacher helps me in that regard.<p>Overall I’ve been learning a lot and I can see myself working with this company for a few years at least.

Working for a startup, working on mobile games. It was just me and an artist, and eventually another developer in a room, just working away, while the founder came by every 1-3 days and would look at our progress, brainstorm ideas for the game with us, and then go off and leave us alone.<p>Unfortunately he had too much of a &quot;if we build it, they will come&quot; mentality that infects way too many people in charge, and didn&#x27;t put enough of an effort into marketing, or making sure we were working on a project that consumers wanted in the first place, so the games fell with a thud when they hit the market, but I was able to focus on making and learning, and I learned a tooooon in that period of time.<p>I haven&#x27;t worked in a similar environment since. Big open spaces, lots of people and distractions, lots of people constantly wanting status updates, not much time to focus and really get work done, let alone learn anything.<p>Like at my current job, it&#x27;s slowly gotten so bad that right now I have 3-4 hours of status updates most days (1 for devs, 1 for our department, 1 for our business unit, 1 for our data center, 1 for a specific upgrade project we&#x27;ve had for the past several months, and each lasts at least 30 minutes, usually longer) along with other meetings so my work day doesn&#x27;t really begin until 3pm most days (and there&#x27;s been multiple days when I was stuck on a phone until 10pm or later), and I&#x27;m still expected to make progress on four different projects and manage offshore developers and get development work done (that the offshore devs can&#x27;t do) on top of all that. Things are slipping even with me working into the evening and a bit on weekends and those meetings are just drowning me, but I&#x27;m the only person in the department that has the domain knowledge they need (anymore, everyone else has left or transferred to another department) and they&#x27;re stretching me beyond thin.<p>My own boss resigned because of this nonsense. He was the one that used to be able to shield me from this, and his replacement has just increased the amount of meetings I have to attend with his gung-ho, &quot;fix all the problems this department has ever had&quot; now attitude.<p>I really need to find another job.

Small team<p>Good funding<p>People with multidisciplinary skill sets<p>Python<p>No silos<p>Access to agile contractors when a burst of effort is needed<p>Good reach and visibility within the organization

Freedom to do the work any way, anywhere.

Honestly working full remote. But too much of anything gets old and I&#x27;m looking to get back into an office with 3 days in and 2 days out or even 4 in and 1 out.<p>As for team dynamics it was my first job. The cheapos would hire only very junior engineers. This meant terrible code quality but a young team eagar to make the jump in our careers. We learned a lot from each other and many of us are still in communication 10 years later. Despite being scattered across the country.

I am a developer and innovator. Absolute worst is being managed by sys&#x2F;app admins. They bring their cultural baggage to the relationship, screw us up by insisting on recipe&#x2F;plan-based project management, are jealous of the &quot;fun&quot; stuff that developers do, and are fearful of our analytical skillset, which we&#x27;ve honed differently than them because that&#x27;s our focus, instead of keeping the lights on.<p>Best environment is the polar opposite of that.

My previous one. Small tech team of 20 of the smartest and most driven people I&#x27;d ever worked with, very little interference from management, lean development processes and an exceedingly proactive IT support team. I learned more in that place in the space of 18 months than I had in my previous 8 years. Of course this didn&#x27;t last forever - we were acquired by a competitor who burned the whole thing to the ground. We&#x27;ve all moved on since.

Managers who don&#x27;t shoot you down and say no, and are supportive and encouraging.<p>Innovation comes from the bottom more frequently than the top, and given time to understand a problem and stew on what is really needed there are rare engineers who can drive the very best work. If the environment stymies that then all is lost, they and others will leave.<p>My best work has been in the context of supportive, light-touch leadership, high autonomy teams, the ability to really own a problem.

I&#x27;m very productive once in a while working weekends thanks to the empty office and being relaxed. I wish I could swap those 2 days but the team would suffer.

Everybody needs slightly different motivation and environment. Some require silence and closed space. Some thrive through constant interaction with others. Some, me included, need some level of difficulty and pressure (&quot;nobody else solved it, this is critical, etc.&quot;).<p>Great discussion, but try not to reorg your workplace based on the data driven from such small and likely biased (hn readers are not randomly selected, etc.) sample.

I had an interior office with a solid door, walls covered in whiteboards, excellent monitors, good hardware, and a fast net connection. If I needed to ask someone something, I could send an email. If it was urgent, I could knock on someone&#x27;s door. If I wanted, I could work outside on a patio or in an office with a giant window. There was an excellent BBQ joint on the same block.

I think the best is a loose structure with high level delivery times. Open office is great for engineers in teams of 5-8 people, which is ideal imo.<p>Open communication is always key. It should feel like a family. The manager&#x2F;lead needs to be strong, decisive, and protect their people from all the politics.<p>Learning should always be an opportunity. Engineers should feel safe taking risks and making mistakes.

If I may, a musical analogy:<p>My experience programming for myself: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-8aHsJdMEMY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-8aHsJdMEMY</a><p>My experience with agile&#x2F;scrum: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=N9-7uLg-DZU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=N9-7uLg-DZU</a>

none. bad pay, 45 hours a week. ignorant cooksucker managers. poor infrastructure. zoombie coworkers. I have always doing the bare minimum in my workplaces trying to win the maximum amount of money I can, that is since I discovered that is the way all works in my country, 0 motivation. also I&#x27;m not a person that wants to change the world.

I live in Bali and occasionally consult for companies back in London. I’m on UTC+8 so if I start early I get most of the day uninterrupted and then an hour or so of overlap.<p>It’s incredibly productive for me but I’m lucky that I enjoy programming enough to rarely get distracted by my picturesque surroundings during the day.

Completely remote company, where everyone was based on Slack.<p>We were on throughout the day. There were no formal meetings. Just a long stream of discussion on the future, and everyone was always synced on what to do.<p>Nobody bugged or interrupted each other unless it was really important and they had to drop everything.

Last few years I&#x27;ve been working for a company I already knew, by myself, on a codebase I built from scratch. Telecommuting. Customer-facing, when stuff is done, I hand it over to their ops team. Don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever been more productive.

My best work has been done while I&#x27;ve been left to my own devices for days or even weeks at a time and I&#x27;ve got this mad desire to build something. I can&#x27;t really control this mad desire. It happens sometimes but I can&#x27;t seem to force it. Mostly when someone else wants me to do something I can&#x27;t get the desire to actually do it. A lot of the stuff I&#x27;ve build has been interesting to me, but not really useful. A few times the desire to build something has actually produced something useful to others, though.