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My startup, Haekka (https://haekka.com https://haekka.com) functions similarly. We don’t deal with office politics and bullshit. We only have two FTEs (founders

My startup, Haekka (https://haekka.com https://haekka.com) functions similarly. We don’t deal with office politics and bullshit. We only have two FTEs (founders) and 3 contractors. We’re 100% remote and have no plans on not being remote. My previous company that I sold was remote for 7 years. I don’t believe in building software in an office. We’re very transparent about our financial and business goals. My only scheduled meeting is a weekly dev sync that I do think is very helpful, but we don’t do daily standups or daily calls. All comms are done through Slack, GitHub PR comments and Linear comments. I will likely be hiring a contract python (or full stack) dev in Q1 as well as a growth marketing position. Feel free to email me ryan@haekka.com

dgellow 6y ago
What does FTE means here?
- dumbfoundded 6y ago
  Usually Full Time Employee
- qeternity 6y ago
  Full time equivalent. Basically it means one person.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    Thanks!
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  In this context FTE means a fully loaded W2 employee making a salary. A contractor can still be "full-time", but they aren't technically an FTE. They are a contract employee that works at least 35 hours per week, but this is not considered an FTE.
recursive 6y ago
How do you avoid dealing with politics? A lot of people I've heard say "they don't do politics" are affected by it just as much as anyone else. They're just bad at it.
- dbrueck 6y ago
  I don't know how others do it, but at companies I've started or where I otherwise have a say in things, (1) we don't have any titles and (b) during interviewing we weigh personality almost more than tech ability. If someone is generous, has a good sense of humor, open to feedback, is laid back but still driven, and seems to love building cool stuff for the joy it brings, odds are pretty good that they will have little interest in the contention & disruption of office politics. It doesn't completely eliminate politics but it comes pretty close. When it hasn't worked out, in most cases some coaching of people one-on-one has helped them improve, and in the other cases - where they seemed uninterested or unwilling to change, we just fired them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  Everyone is hired for a specific job. The details of that job are explicit to both parties. Where there is ambiguity we call that out and set that expectation (ex: that this duty may change). This alone avoids a lot of the “not my job problem” or people trying to encroach on someone else’s job. In turn, this reduces chances of conflict and politics. Additionally, we keep communication extremely focused on work. There are no slack channels for watercooling, there are no “get to meet each other” zoom calls. We (including founders) log on, we do our work, we communicate (via text) about issues, wins, concerns, questions, and we log off. There’s no expectation of working hours (save for that weekly dev sync I mentioned). We also don’t preset deadlines. I’m not going to sit here and say we don’t have target dates, because we do. But it’s an explicit function of engineering to determine the scope of a feature and to assign it an effort. Based on that effort I can then forecast when it might get done. But there’s no deadline. This is just good engineering practice and also helps us improve our code quality over time. We do not share forecast completion dates with users and customers. The most we will say is that we’re working on something. No etas. We’ve also built in a culture of shipping constantly. Shipping a feature or a release isn’t some big event. I might log on in the morning and see that a feature was finished over night (including final QA, etc.) and I’ll just release it. This takes a lot of pressure off development. Because we’re so comfortable releasing, even if there was an issue, we could just roll back. I’ve had to do this twice now and it was a non issue. The release notes hadn’t even been emailed to users yet, so no harm.
mandeepj 6y ago
> We don’t deal with office politics and bullshit. Maybe you meant to say - you don't have office politics. If you are not "dealing" with it then you are creating a bigger problem. I believe politics are a side product of humans working together. It'll just be there. Just like eating causes you to fart. Related interesting read but looks good only on paper - https://hbr.org/2016/06/how-facebook-tries-to-prevent-office-politics https://hbr.org/2016/06/how-facebook-tries-to-prevent-office...
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  Sure. I mean we don't have it. It hasn't come up. If it did, we'd obviously deal with it.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    > avoids ... people trying to encroach on someone else’s job To me, that mindset sounds a bit like office politics itself -- i mean, using a negatively loaded word for branching a bit outside one's usual work tasks. I'd generally be fine if my coworkers sometimes worked in"my" parts of the code base (or whatever it is) but it seems as if at where you work, they're not allowed to do that
canarysplit 6y ago
Hello Ryan, I've just launched a site which has a goal to collect different companies that support Gumroad's model - https://creatorjobs.co/ https://creatorjobs.co/ I've listed your company there. Please let me know if you have any concerns about that - contact@creatorjobs.co.

dgellow 6y ago

What does FTE means here?

dumbfoundded 6y ago
Usually Full Time Employee
qeternity 6y ago
Full time equivalent. Basically it means one person.
- dgellow 6y ago
  Thanks!
ryanSrich 6y ago
In this context FTE means a fully loaded W2 employee making a salary. A contractor can still be "full-time", but they aren't technically an FTE. They are a contract employee that works at least 35 hours per week, but this is not considered an FTE.

recursive 6y ago

How do you avoid dealing with politics? A lot of people I've heard say "they don't do politics" are affected by it just as much as anyone else. They're just bad at it.

dbrueck 6y ago
I don't know how others do it, but at companies I've started or where I otherwise have a say in things, (1) we don't have any titles and (b) during interviewing we weigh personality almost more than tech ability. If someone is generous, has a good sense of humor, open to feedback, is laid back but still driven, and seems to love building cool stuff for the joy it brings, odds are pretty good that they will have little interest in the contention & disruption of office politics. It doesn't completely eliminate politics but it comes pretty close. When it hasn't worked out, in most cases some coaching of people one-on-one has helped them improve, and in the other cases - where they seemed uninterested or unwilling to change, we just fired them.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ryanSrich 6y ago
Everyone is hired for a specific job. The details of that job are explicit to both parties. Where there is ambiguity we call that out and set that expectation (ex: that this duty may change). This alone avoids a lot of the “not my job problem” or people trying to encroach on someone else’s job. In turn, this reduces chances of conflict and politics. Additionally, we keep communication extremely focused on work. There are no slack channels for watercooling, there are no “get to meet each other” zoom calls. We (including founders) log on, we do our work, we communicate (via text) about issues, wins, concerns, questions, and we log off. There’s no expectation of working hours (save for that weekly dev sync I mentioned). We also don’t preset deadlines. I’m not going to sit here and say we don’t have target dates, because we do. But it’s an explicit function of engineering to determine the scope of a feature and to assign it an effort. Based on that effort I can then forecast when it might get done. But there’s no deadline. This is just good engineering practice and also helps us improve our code quality over time. We do not share forecast completion dates with users and customers. The most we will say is that we’re working on something. No etas. We’ve also built in a culture of shipping constantly. Shipping a feature or a release isn’t some big event. I might log on in the morning and see that a feature was finished over night (including final QA, etc.) and I’ll just release it. This takes a lot of pressure off development. Because we’re so comfortable releasing, even if there was an issue, we could just roll back. I’ve had to do this twice now and it was a non issue. The release notes hadn’t even been emailed to users yet, so no harm.

mandeepj 6y ago

> We don’t deal with office politics and bullshit. Maybe you meant to say - you don't have office politics. If you are not "dealing" with it then you are creating a bigger problem. I believe politics are a side product of humans working together. It'll just be there. Just like eating causes you to fart. Related interesting read but looks good only on paper - https://hbr.org/2016/06/how-facebook-tries-to-prevent-office-politics https://hbr.org/2016/06/how-facebook-tries-to-prevent-office...

ryanSrich 6y ago
Sure. I mean we don't have it. It hasn't come up. If it did, we'd obviously deal with it.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  > avoids ... people trying to encroach on someone else’s job To me, that mindset sounds a bit like office politics itself -- i mean, using a negatively loaded word for branching a bit outside one's usual work tasks. I'd generally be fine if my coworkers sometimes worked in"my" parts of the code base (or whatever it is) but it seems as if at where you work, they're not allowed to do that

canarysplit 6y ago

Hello Ryan, I've just launched a site which has a goal to collect different companies that support Gumroad's model - https://creatorjobs.co/ https://creatorjobs.co/ I've listed your company there. Please let me know if you have any concerns about that - contact@creatorjobs.co.