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Userify (https://userify.com https://userify.com) is similar; meetings are rare (except probably with customers). Most communication occurs in one-on-ones, with

Userify (https://userify.com https://userify.com) is similar; meetings are rare (except probably with customers). Most communication occurs in one-on-ones, with a strong bias toward the minimum number of team members for any project. Most team members are contractors, even those working on new top-secret products, which might be because the core team is small and based in Texas and most devs are geographically elsewhere. It does seem to take up some time to build trust on new commits, which is a bit discouraging at first, but reviews are usually within 24 hours. Pay is based on deliverables, not hourly or salaried, so you don't get paid for time spent learning or experimenting, but free training and classes. The core team seems a bit old school and conservative in tech choices (not much in the way of k8s, for example), and there's not much in the way of "team" tools like you might expect for a geographically distributed team, which seems to slow things down a bit and reduce communication velocity, but they're very responsive (this might be because it's a smaller, security-focused company). Also a rather complex 10-page NDA.

onion2k 6y ago
Most communication occurs in one-on-ones, with a strong bias toward the minimum number of team members for any project. Putting my best future prediction hat on, this means only a few people know what's actually going on. If the company grows there'll be competing antagonist efforts from different parts of the business. You'll start scheduling strategy meetings to avoid this because it's a waste of money, and that will drive away your early hires who joined because there was a culture of no meetings.
- skynet-9000 6y ago
  That's a good point and might eventually lead to inefficiency or looser team cohesion. Management reaction to strong growth probably feels more like Apple than Microsoft, but maybe with less angst ;)
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    Not sure how influential you are, but one thing I've noticed is that when meetings start to feel unproductive, its due to one of two reasons. The first is when you have NxM meetings. What does that mean? Well, you have, say, N people representing one interest, and M representing another. You put them all in a room together. This usually only happens when a decision has to be made, and it sucks (note: it's fine if you're just brainstorming, where no decision is being made). This is a great place for leadership to exist; if instead you take the lead from N, and the lead from M, you reduce it back to a 1-on-1 meeting, and then each of those individuals can go back to their teams with what was decided, and have 1xN and 1xM communication. The other instance is where that 1xN or 1xM meeting feels unproductive. Note the nature of these meetings - they are mostly informational. They're either getting information to inform a future decision (and possibly decide on what the team's position is depending on how egalitarian the org is; I still consider these an informational meeting, since then the leader is more a representative, and trying to find out what the group believes, in order to represent it elsewhere), or they're communicating that a decision has been made. These can likely be done via some asynchronous mechanisms rather than meetings, to avoid it feeling like an unnecessary meeting (and to have documentation of the information!). If it is done as a meeting, be aggressive with providing an agenda, and ensuring only members of a single team/department/etc, and ideally hierarchy level, are included. If you have more than that, you almost assuredly are having a meeting that is 1x(N+M+...), because you're including multiple groups. And those groups have different priorities, interests, etc, and at least part of your meeting is almost assuredly going to be boring and unnecessary for them.

onion2k 6y ago

Most communication occurs in one-on-ones, with a strong bias toward the minimum number of team members for any project. Putting my best future prediction hat on, this means only a few people know what's actually going on. If the company grows there'll be competing antagonist efforts from different parts of the business. You'll start scheduling strategy meetings to avoid this because it's a waste of money, and that will drive away your early hires who joined because there was a culture of no meetings.

skynet-9000 6y ago
That's a good point and might eventually lead to inefficiency or looser team cohesion. Management reaction to strong growth probably feels more like Apple than Microsoft, but maybe with less angst ;)
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Not sure how influential you are, but one thing I've noticed is that when meetings start to feel unproductive, its due to one of two reasons. The first is when you have NxM meetings. What does that mean? Well, you have, say, N people representing one interest, and M representing another. You put them all in a room together. This usually only happens when a decision has to be made, and it sucks (note: it's fine if you're just brainstorming, where no decision is being made). This is a great place for leadership to exist; if instead you take the lead from N, and the lead from M, you reduce it back to a 1-on-1 meeting, and then each of those individuals can go back to their teams with what was decided, and have 1xN and 1xM communication. The other instance is where that 1xN or 1xM meeting feels unproductive. Note the nature of these meetings - they are mostly informational. They're either getting information to inform a future decision (and possibly decide on what the team's position is depending on how egalitarian the org is; I still consider these an informational meeting, since then the leader is more a representative, and trying to find out what the group believes, in order to represent it elsewhere), or they're communicating that a decision has been made. These can likely be done via some asynchronous mechanisms rather than meetings, to avoid it feeling like an unnecessary meeting (and to have documentation of the information!). If it is done as a meeting, be aggressive with providing an agenda, and ensuring only members of a single team/department/etc, and ideally hierarchy level, are included. If you have more than that, you almost assuredly are having a meeting that is 1x(N+M+...), because you're including multiple groups. And those groups have different priorities, interests, etc, and at least part of your meeting is almost assuredly going to be boring and unnecessary for them.