A company isn't a family. Parents don't fire their kids for low performance or furlough them in hard times.
A better vision for a workplace is a community—a place where people bond around shared values, feel valued as human beings, and have a voice in decisions that affect them.
At a well-run seed stage startup, engineers will often describe the work experience as intoxicating . At a larger company, the best you get is "enjoyable".
Our culture is four things: customer obsession instead of competitor obsession; willingness to think long term, with a longer investment horizon than most of our peers; eagerness to invent, which of course goes hand in hand with failure; and then, finally, taking professional pride in operational excellence.
I know the founders of an AI chip company that taped out and got working chips on their first go. They got their chip done, it’s pretty solid. Chip has great perf and is super power efficient, a solid delivery. I knew they'd nail it and they did.
The SW story is a train wreck, though. The problem basically was that they couldn’t hire any good SW... See more