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Clef's company handbook

• codinghorror 11y ago
  Absolutely zero remote work, yet I built Stack Overflow with a team of entirely remote developers, and do the same with Discourse today. I guess every company culture is a series of choices, but it is very hard to be diverse -- which appears to be one of Clef's main goals -- when you only recruit in a tightly limited geographic area.
  • jessepollak 11y ago
    Yeah, at our current size + team composition we don't feel like we have the knowledge/experience to do remote work well. With that informing our decision making, we've decided to prioritize other things (that have different tradeoffs). I think as we keep growing this will definitely change. Would love to learn from someone like you who's obviously been super successful at doing remote well :)
    • thoman23 11y ago
      You might be overthinking how hard it is to allow remote work.
    • eitally 11y ago
      My $.02 is that being successful with remote workers is a management problem. If you're a good manager and you hire well, you'll have few problems. This coming from a guy who worked from home for most of the past ten years, remotely managing a group of 100+ who were located in ten different time zones (including, but not limited to the US, Scotland, Hungary, India, Singapore, China, Mexico and Brazil). Constant, clear communications and a stated set of mid- and long-term coals is absolutely critical. Get the team aligned, organize your product development, and ensure a consistent, timely feedback loop and you'll be ok. Also, make sure you get all the key players physically together at least 2-4 times per year.
  • cjbprime 11y ago
    I tried to read about Stack Overflow and Discourse's diversity, but all I could find was these two pages of guys: http://stackexchange.com/about/management http://stackexchange.com/about/management http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/ http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/ Maybe you have better links? Or maybe you weren't saying that Discourse and Stack Overflow did well on diversity; merely that you think Clef will do badly too? (They seem to be doing reasonably okay right now to me.)
    • meowface 11y ago
      His comment was accurate in that you are constraining many vectors of diversity by only hiring from a specific location, even if gender likely isn't one of those vectors. Also, the gender of a company's management team doesn't necessarily reflect the gender distribution of all their employees. And I don't believe Discourse is owned by Stack Exchange.
    • benihana 11y ago
      Completely irrelevant, baiting non-sequitur. Your perception of his company's diversity does not change the validity of his point about having a less diverse pool to hire from.
      • cjbprime 11y ago
        > Your perception of his company's diversity does not change the validity of his point about having a less diverse pool to hire from. It changes how seriously I would take his advice. If someone says "I did X, and without X it would be very hard to do Y.", you would assume that they actually did Y. If you later find out that they didn't do Y, and further that the people they're advising to change their behavior and start doing X are better at Y than they were.. it's a sign you might feel free to ignore their advice.
    • RogerL 11y ago
      https://github.com/clef/handbook/issues/69 https://github.com/clef/handbook/issues/69 https://github.com/clef/handbook/commit/4794bc93db32222855b4ee601e2a7b79554c5b21 https://github.com/clef/handbook/commit/4794bc93db32222855b4... https://github.com/clef/handbook/commit/d25a1e33adf93ad6bb892ec4f185f91a3eadfcf9 https://github.com/clef/handbook/commit/d25a1e33adf93ad6bb89...
  • famousactress 11y ago
    Jeff, I didn't know this about SO or Discourse! I follow coding horror, is this something you've written about extensively? We need more voices. The value-leverage remote work has is so huge. Makes it really frustrating that there aren't more people really talking about it (slash doing it). I recently noticed that Slack also doesn't appear to support remote work. Kind of an ultimate irony :(
  • CamperBob2 11y ago
    +1. Unless you're a believer in affirmative action, which I'm not, the ultimate way to work for diversity is to not even know what races, colors, or sexes your employees are.
    • stfp 11y ago
      Two thoughts: - It's not a ternary choice between being racist/bigoted, perfectly neutral, or practicing affirmative action. You (along with everyone else) have a set of implicit biases; to curb them and better yourself, you have to take into account things like gender, color or age. - How do you not know these things in a small startup?
      • PopeOfNope 11y ago
        You (along with everyone else) have a set of implicit biases Which you can correct for without ever meeting the person in question or taking into account their gender, color or age. How do you not know these things in a small startup? I don't understand. Does starting a company suddenly make you stupid?
  • jessedhillon 11y ago
    In what way do you consider the Discourse and Stack Overflow teams to be diverse?
  • slantedview 11y ago
    I like how the remote work page mentions how many hours employees typically work. This hints at a misinformed mindset about the nature of remote work.
    • slantedview 11y ago
      Not sure what the downvotes are about. The documents mention elsewhere that 45-50 hours are the norm. Mentioning it again on the "no remote work" page gives the impression that the authors view remote is unworkable due to hours or that remote workers need to be reminded of expected hours. You can dislike that and downvote it if you want, but it doesn't change that it is.
  • makeitsuckless 11y ago
    I'm sorry, but I think these recurring "we do everything remote" are cheap shots from the outliers that produce software that, with all due respect, is relatively simple, usually the "for developers, by developers" kind of stuff. I work with a team that deals with a highly complex domain, and for us it is absolutely essential that we are close to and regularly interact with the rest of the business. This can't be replaced by remote work unless I create an extra layer of analysts to tell the developers what to code, which is both highly inefficient, removes a lot of potential innovation that comes from the synergy between people looking at the challenges for different angles, and a lot less fun for everyone involved. For me, what happens between developers and non-technical coworkers in the hallways and during lunch is an essential part of the process of making great products together that cannot be replaced by remote work. (To be clear: within the dev teams we are completely set up for remote work, and any developer can work from home at any time without prior permission. It's certainly not a matter of lack of trust or facilities.)
    • scrollaway 11y ago
      How is discourse "for developers"? And how do you call his post "cheap shots from the outliers" when he repeated the success in another domain?
  • mmaunder 11y ago
    Also not sure I agree with the rationale they provide for remote not working for their needs. As a small team, things move very quickly and decisions are made or reversed as new information helps guide us. This makes it really hard to keep up with company progress for anyone who isn’t in the office participating in all of the conversations that are going on. As a result, we put a high premium on physical colocation, even though this limits the geography that we can recruit from. I think this is a common misconception and tools like Slack (or previously IRC) and smart scheduling of skype conferences can go a long way to helping. It's worked great for our team. Our size varies, but up to 14 people collaborating from around the country and world. Remember, working remotely reduces environmental impact, gives your team more family time because you eliminate the commute, diversity has also been mentioned, larger hiring pool, multiple languages is often a nice side-effect and it gives you multiple time zones which is great for support teams.
  • lultimouomo 11y ago
    I do basically all my work as a remote consultant, so I applaud your commitment to remote work, but I want to play devil's advocate. Could it be that hiring remote forces you to be more conservative in choosing developers, favoring ones with ultra strong resumes (in the general sense, not strictly thing written in a PDF), therefore making you pay more for talent and passing on people which could have strong skills but less experience? It seems reasonable that having people come into the office every day lets you judge them better and quicker, especially if they're not expected to be 100% autonomous. This would lower the risk of hiring someone you think has potential but hasn't proved it yet, which could turn out well for both the employee and the company (as he will be - fairly - paid less).
  • jacques_chester 11y ago
    Stack Overflow HQ is in NYC, one of the most diverse population centres in the USA and the world. In my daily work at Pivotal Labs, also in NYC, I am embedded in a TDD, pair-all-the-time team. But I also frequently interact with the fully distributed Spring development team via internal Slack channels. I don't think one approach strictly dominates the other in general. It's contextual. For example: I have ADHD. I have discovered that I actively dislike working alone. Pairing is a godsend for me. Sure, remote pairing is possible. We have one Pivot with around ten thousand hours of remote pairing experience, and others with hundreds to thousands of hours of remote pairing experience. For most cases it is not as good as a single team in a single location and most of our remote pivots spend time in our offices.
  • mbesto 11y ago
    To be fair, not many companies understand how to operate businesses effectively with remote employees.
• gailees 11y ago
  I've been spending a ton of time researching how startups build a diverse team with an inclusive culture and honestly have struggled to find much literature on it. Though I don't agree with everything in the Clef handbook, it was an extremely informative read. It's hard to spell out inclusion in words, but this seems like a solid start.
  • famousactress 11y ago
    My (obv unsolicited) advice for inclusive+diverse: hire for empathy.
    • mistermann 11y ago
      What do you mean by that?
      • famousactress 11y ago
        I'm being totally literal. Prioritize empathy for others as a quality you look for in candidates/colleagues. It's not all that hard to spot and interview for, and I think it's crazy valuable in teams. Particularly (this is relevant to my work) when you're not your own user (because you build for a market of users that you aren't.. like tools for doctors or journalists, or I dunno). This article[1] has some good things to say around this. [1] http://ideas.ted.com/the-secret-ingredient-that-makes-some-teams-better-than-others/ http://ideas.ted.com/the-secret-ingredient-that-makes-some-t...
        • lsc 11y ago
          > Prioritize empathy for others as a quality you look for in candidates/colleagues. My experience has been that most people are very empathetic to "their people" and much less empathetic to everyone else, so I suspect you'd end up with the same people you'd get if you took the "hire more people like us" default.
          • mmatants 11y ago
• mrmondo 11y ago
  Fantastic idea, I'd love to see more of this. Not only does it promote transparency and positive change but it also gives people a leg to stand on if the company doesn't do what they public say they do.
• zhte415 11y ago
  I was involved with the setup of a new department in a mega-corp that went from 10 people to 464 people in 1.5 years. It was tough. The big stuff, like getting projects pushed to our office (mainly previously outsourced stuff) wasn't hard. The boss made a phone call, and that was that. The small stuff was hard, the stuff from the employee perspective, many fresh university graduates, was hard. From interviewing to employee on-boarding checklists to establishing a training curriculum to benefits, rewards, mentoring, performance measurement. That was hard. Being part of a mega-corp didn't make this easier. Sure, there was stuff like a solid IT infrastructure and policies established from a leadership perspective, little implementable value existed as a turn-key solution, it all had to be adapted, mixed and changed. Which was in great contrast with my first company, where very clear, consistent and gradually adapted policies existed (it was a small company, 1000 people, with a 400 year history and very very few people ever left). Around a year later one of the internal consultants advising the department (and me, in particular) created a global roll-out of a 'minimum standards' type document to 20,000+ employees documenting everything discovered to be undocumented. I still refer to this handbook that covers all that needs to be understood in operations management to a minimum level (800+ pages). Putting Clef's handbook on Github is fantastic. Not all of it might be applicable for everyone, but it is something where often there's nothing. But do think carefully, does this apply for us? If not, write it down.
  • miander 11y ago
    I'm guessing you'd have mentioned if it was, but is your handbook published or otherwise available anywhere?
    • zhte415 11y ago
      Unfortunately not. The internal classification is 'confidential'. I'm not much a believer of security by obscurity, but that's the company decision and I respect that. When I say refer to (since I left this organisation), I mean mentally. Putting all that in place established some solid structured thinking which I'm looking to share, but that's not ready yet - when it is I will post a link on HN :)
  • deleted 11y ago
• laurentoget 11y ago
  Unless i am missing something the idea of giving .9% equity to every employee is not going to be sustainable if you grow. I am curious how solve that bit when the company grows, in terms of numbers of employees, or in terms of valuation. Also, if everybody is getting the same valuation in the long term, are you re-inventing the idea of a cooperative?
  • Kudos 11y ago
    This document isn't set in stone, I'm certain the plan is to reduce the amount of equity offered as the company grows.
  • mperham 11y ago
    I also noticed they vest over six years, not four. Very unusual in my experience and means that they're effectively giving 0.6%, 0.15%/yr. https://github.com/clef/handbook/blob/master/Hiring%20Documents/Clef%20Offer%20Letter.md https://github.com/clef/handbook/blob/master/Hiring%20Docume...
• capisce 11y ago
  Codifying a 45-50 hour work week really doesn't help.
  • saryant 11y ago
    OTOH, at least they put it in public. Now people know not to apply.
    • thoman23 11y ago
      Man, no kidding. Why would anyone want to sign up for that? 45-50 hours codified face time in your open office cattle farm. Get permission from a founder at least a day in advance if god forbid you need to be out of the office for something. Not only do I not want to work there, but I'll think twice before signing up with them as my 2FA provider.
      • Stasis5001 11y ago
        Permission from one of several founders at a 10 person company is proportionally equivalent to letting your team lead know you'll be absent. That's not exactly an excessive standard, is it? Further, an open expectation of 45-50 hours at a place that also encourages spending 4 of those hours on self-study seems fine compared to the risk-adjusted industry average.
        • hoorayimhelping 11y ago
          It's the implication of what the rule means. There's a huge difference between "let someone know you're going to be absent" and "ask a founder for permission to not have to come to the office."
        • PlzSnow 11y ago
          An expectation of 45-50 hours work is illegal in most of the developed world. This company is legally free to require that, and prospective employees are free to work somewhere else, that treats their staff like normal human beings.
• noelwelsh 11y ago
  I think it's great to see increased transparency in company procedures, and I will probably steal some aspects of it. OTOH, the implementation is slightly disappointing. No remote work plus "we expect full-time employees to be at the Clef office between 45 and 50 hours a week" is definitely decreasing the pool of potential employees. As a parent there is NFW I would sign up to 10 hour days, but I'm glad the company is open about it's expectations, and they have the right to create the kind of company they want (within the limits of the law).
  • deleted 11y ago
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• crdoconnor 11y ago
  IMO a real commitment to equal opportunity would mean no at-will employment (i.e. no firing for undisclosed reasons) and only blind interviews (e.g. online pair programming without speech/video): http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/b... "We interview for culture/team fit" also typically signals a desire to avoid diversity.
  • deleted 11y ago
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  • Pyxl101 11y ago
    Making it difficult to fire ineffective people, or doing so slowly, is one of the best ways to ruin an organization. The friction that exists around firing in many countries seems to be part of why they have less effective business innovation and investment. Companies can't hire someone without significant risk, because firing them will be difficult if they don't work out, and so they're averse to hiring. Meanwhile, poor performers stir dissatisfaction among other employees, especially effective ones. This makes it harder to start new companies and grow. It's preferable for both employee and employer have the right of free association. If it's not working for either side, just end it. See "‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups" for a recent examination of this in startup hiring. As organizations tend to grow larger, they tend to accumulate less effective people over time, since people tend to hire those who are less effective than themselves, rather than more effective. A counter-balance is necessary to preserve organizational effectiveness, which includes making it possible to fire genuinely ineffective people without a lot of hassle and drama. Some countries have truly ridiculous firing processes that involve a committee of one's peers, and the whole nearby office gets dragged into one person's poor performance. Employers and employees don't owe each other an obligation to keep providing compensation or labor. If a company is unfair in its management practices, and undervalues effective workers, then that company will flounder in the market compared to companies that value them appropriately. The problem will fix itself over time, without simultaneously saddling down fair and appropriate companies with the baggage of making it hard for them to fire their bad people.
• thisone 11y ago
  Bit of an interesting marketing campaign. Put your handbook out, watch your target end users learn who you are and check out your products. The end users feel like they really know you and feel more positive towards your products when they come to choose a vendor.
• switch007 11y ago
  handbook/Operations Documents/Interview Process.md: "Finally, the candidate should come in for a whole day of talking to and working with the team. ..[after lunch] back to the office for one on ones with everyone." Wow, I wonder how much they compensate you for a "team fit day".
  • mrmondo 11y ago
    Yes this seems inefficient, it would also distract the team every time someone was being interviewed.
    • jacques_chester 11y ago
      Hiring is a strategic lever, especially early on. I work for Pivotal Labs. For engineering hiring we do onsite pairing interviews that last a day, divided across two teams. Whenever possible, which is most of the time, on a real task on a real project. The disruption is worth it, because engineers get to pick their peers.
      • sweetleon 11y ago
        I work at Pivotal Labs also. I don't even find it that disruptive to interview candidates on our projects bc I'm still working on what I'd be doing that day. It's certainly less disruptive than marching our entire team one after another into a conference room where they grill the candidate for an hour at a time, which is what most employers do.
• GaiusCoffee 11y ago
  Damn it, I thought it's for Dr. Clef of The Foundation :(
• mseebach 11y ago
  This looks like the work of a bit of a control freak. It seems odd to codify so many things in so much detail. It seems they are a pretty small and young company (the handbook has multiple references to being less than 10 employees, their Twitter account joined in 2012), so why do they feel the need to specify how many weeks of vacation you should have taken in the year leading up to the sabbatical you earn in your fifth year of employment? Some of these things seem ripe for deviating from before they even see their first legitimate use: "It makes Clef look great when our employees speak at industry conferences" -- so employees are allowed to go four times a year, spending $1000 each time, subject to approval, oh, and this is a "benefit"? Anyway, it's nice -- but does this mean that if there's a conference somewhere, everybody agrees it's a great opportunity, but it's my fifth, and it will cost $1100, then we just shrug and don't go? No, I thought not, so why have the rule at all? What, exactly, is the problem they are solving by writing this stuff down? I get it at a larger company, where you need to align expectations across a larger body of employees, but when you're <10 employees, you can literally just raise your voice in the room and say "Any reason we shouldn't send Joe to FooCon to speak about the FizzBuzz? It's a bit pricey, probably $1100, but it's it worth it right?" -- that's a much more transparent decision than anything written in a handbook.
  • chimeracoder 11y ago
    > when you're <10 employees, you can literally just raise your voice in the room and say "Any reason we shouldn't send Joe to FooCon to speak about the FizzBuzz? It's a bit pricey, probably $1100, but it's it worth it right?" -- that's a much more transparent decision than anything written in a handbook. This handbook doesn't preclude that; it just says that this is the minimum that every employee can expect without having to wonder what is reasonable or not. Every company, large or small, has exceptions to policy, and the handbook is just a way of making those guidelines common knowledge, so everyone can feel comfortable knowing what expectations are completely reasonable and what will require special consideration. > so why do they feel the need to specify how many weeks of vacation you should have taken in the year leading up to the sabbatical you earn in your fifth year of employment? One disadvantage of 'unlimited' vacation policies are that expectations are oftentimes unclear, and many people end up taking far less vacation time than they otherwise would or could. This disproportionately impacts women and minorities in the industry for a variety of reasons[0]. People who are used to being marginalized in the workplace (not necessarily at their current job, but in the past) tend to be less aggressive with their demands, even when their demands are completely within reason. Furthermore, for people looking at long-term planning (people with families, or people with other obligations outside work), having clear expectations for not just the short term but the long term as well is a huge bonus. [0] This isn't an argument not to have unlimited vacation policies at all - just that, if you do, you should be conscious of mitigating this effect.
• alextgordon 11y ago
  > Employees also accrue 1 hour of sick leave for every 30 hours of work, but cannot accrue more than 5 days of sick leave. Six months to earn 5 days of sick leave. Why is sick leave a privilege? You're either sick or you're not. If I get the flu 3 months in, do I just take my two days off then come in and infect the office?
  • tim333 11y ago
    Maybe you can overdraw your sick leave if you are actually, like sick?
  • beeboop 11y ago
    Welcome to America, land of the freedom to work yourself to death
    • lentil 11y ago
      Perhaps I've just been lucky, but I've been working in the US for the last 15 years, and the policy at all 4 of the companies I've worked for has been: "if you're sick, don't come in". None of the companies I've worked for has set a limit on the number of days you could be sick for, nor encouraged anyone who didn't feel healthy to come in to work. I appreciate that some companies may do that, but I've never really understood how that works, given that illness is (mostly) not something you can control.
      • beeboop 11y ago
        You've been pretty lucky. I would say 90% of workplaces do not have a sick policy like that.
• PopeOfNope 11y ago
  At Clef we’re working to build an inclusive company with a value-driven culture. Am I the only one who would rather work for an exclusive company than an inclusive one? Inclusive makes it sound like the company will hire anybody, regardless of the value they bring to the company.
• leroy_masochist 11y ago
  One recommendation would be to title each section based on number so that it doesn't default to alphabetical order, which presents things out of the order in which you would want employees to read them. For example, the Onboarding Documents section currently looks like this: Direct Reports.md Internal Transparency.md Objectives and Key Results.md One on Ones.md Product Manifesto.md Welcome to Clef.md It should look like this, organized in the order you want people to read it (this is my best guess, another order might be better): 00 Welcome to Clef.md 01 Product Manifesto.md 02 Objectives and Key Results.md 03 Internal Transparency.md 04 Direct Reports.md 05 One on Ones.md