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It's a startup, yes. I work eight hours a day on average, and being that we have staff on most continents we don't really have a need to be on call. That said,

It's a startup, yes. I work eight hours a day on average, and being that we have staff on most continents we don't really have a need to be on call. That said, I've had a handful of 3am emergencies over the course of the last few years. I work in my garage; so I have no commute, and I no longer lose over two hours a day to commuting. That's meant I contribute far less to open source, which I did while on transit. However, I don't miss commuting at all and am thankful for the time recovered. Balance is blissful. While my wife was on maternity leave for twelve months our girls were at home as well, and so my breaks consisted of spending time with my family. Now I walk them to daycare before work and listen to the rain on my roof while I work.

rooam-dev 8y ago
Thank you for your reply. This gives me more food for thought. I am lead engineer at a start-up and my goal is to create a good work environment for our current and future devs. #1 enemy is the on-call, which should be resolved with customer support + some automation.
- dleslie 8y ago
  FWIW, we're a reasonably successful social application that's _heavy_ on real time networking; so there's always a large number of users active and our services are generally humming along at high throughput. Lots of automated tests. A good community team. Code reviews. A _rigid_ feature-branch-and-test process. A _rigid_ closed beta->open beta->release process. And we still have bugs. But things don't catch fire often, and when they do, it's usually not our fault. ;)
  - rooam-dev 8y ago
    Sounds like what we want to achieve. Good to know it works for others.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
rooam-dev 8y ago
One more question if you don't mind. What is your vacation policy? Fixed amount + required to take or unlimited + take what you need? I am not a big fan of the latter, but not sure how it works for others. Thanks.
- dleslie 8y ago
  AFAICT, unlimited. I just ask and they always say yes. Last year I took around 4 weeks of vacation _as well as_ 5 weeks of paternity leave. I think it helps that they've never taken issue with my general performance; if I weren't satisfactory in my output then I probably would have some push back.

rooam-dev 8y ago

Thank you for your reply. This gives me more food for thought. I am lead engineer at a start-up and my goal is to create a good work environment for our current and future devs. #1 enemy is the on-call, which should be resolved with customer support + some automation.

dleslie 8y ago
FWIW, we're a reasonably successful social application that's _heavy_ on real time networking; so there's always a large number of users active and our services are generally humming along at high throughput. Lots of automated tests. A good community team. Code reviews. A _rigid_ feature-branch-and-test process. A _rigid_ closed beta->open beta->release process. And we still have bugs. But things don't catch fire often, and when they do, it's usually not our fault. ;)
- rooam-dev 8y ago
  Sounds like what we want to achieve. Good to know it works for others.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

rooam-dev 8y ago

One more question if you don't mind. What is your vacation policy? Fixed amount + required to take or unlimited + take what you need? I am not a big fan of the latter, but not sure how it works for others. Thanks.

dleslie 8y ago
AFAICT, unlimited. I just ask and they always say yes. Last year I took around 4 weeks of vacation _as well as_ 5 weeks of paternity leave. I think it helps that they've never taken issue with my general performance; if I weren't satisfactory in my output then I probably would have some push back.