The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion's Blog

Trying to walk that thin line between intelligence and ignorance

The perfect workplace

Posted by Davy Brion on April 24th, 2008

The perfect workplace for me is a place where:

  • People have the required skills and motivation to perform their jobs competently
  • People are honest about mistakes they make… after all, we all make them so we might as well all be honest about them
  • People who play the political game are fired, or if possible, not hired
  • People aren’t offended when told that something they did was not good or could be better
  • People who are sick just stay home instead of infecting others
  • It is accepted that developers spend a little of their worktime to read blogs, mailinglists, etc… to learn
  • People are judged on what they do, not how busy they look
  • People who work together on something are located in the same room
  • People have enough common sense to go to a meeting room or a more secluded area to discuss something that is specific to their project, so they won’t bother everyone else in the room. If that’s not possible, a little bit of voice control would be nice
  • People don’t engage in Buzzword Driven Development ( = claiming to do certain practices or activities while in reality hardly doing them or doing a half-assed job of them)
  • Managers trust the developers
  • Managers don’t make promises they know they can’t keep
  • Managers prefer a long-term vision instead of going for the quick short-term win while completely ignoring the negative consequences that will pop up after they have been reassigned
  • They have proper airconditioning
  • You have access to cheap (or free) drinks and snacks of a wide variety

Unfortunately I was sentenced to Enterprise Hell about 5.5 years ago so I’m not used to most of the stuff mentioned in the list… luckily i’m up for parole in about 2 months!

4 Responses to “The perfect workplace”

  1. stefan Says:

    … don’t forget the :
    * People have the balls to say why they won’t show up part :)

  2. Davy Brion Says:

    how about:
    “People don’t pretend to be friends”

  3. Jon Skeet Says:

    I haven’t been at Google long enough to guarantee all of the above, but so far it’s pretty much matching up to the list.

    Did I mention we’re still hiring?

    http://www.google.com/jobs

    Jon

  4. Davy Brion Says:

    sorry for not including your comment earlier, it was apparantly marked as spam :p

    still waiting on my preordered copy of C# in Depth btw ;)

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