Ideally management is working with IC teams to set good Key Results. Management shares context of what's important (objectives) and IC teams propose good quantitative measures (key results) of how they'll achieve it.
This is the crux of what's wrong with the original article IMO. Key results that are customer centric as opposed to "ship {thing}" help keep teams focused on the thing that actually matters.
Of course there will be a tendency to try to game the metric, but the flip side of having customer centric goals is teams become feature factories, building idea after idea without constantly evaluating "are the things we're shipping driving the change in customer behavior they're intended to drive".
Yeah this checks out. I forget the numbers but when we were building StatusPage I remember pulling some data on incidents and a pretty good percentage referenced or linked to another status page (usually meaning their incident was "caused" by an upstream provider).
StatusPage.io helps companies be more transparent with their customers around downtime. Companies like Atlassian, Citrix, Reddit, Cloudflare, New Relic, and Vimeo rely on our product to keep their customers in the loop when their site is down, slow, or undergoing scheduled maintenance. We're profitable, and believe in running a sustainable company with teammates that help us grow and enrich our lives.
Denver / San Francisco - Rails Engineer
Your job as a Full Stack Rails Engineer is to work on our infrastructure, and sling code for new features. Your domain is server land, ruby and rails, and all of the external services we use to keep the business running. You'll also be contributing to discussions around infrastructure architecture, performance and resilience of the system, and making sure everything is in tip top shape for us to continue to be a nimble development organization.
San Francisco - Account Executive
Your job as an Account Executive is to help scale our enterprise offering across new inbound signups, existing customers, and prospects. As one of our first Account Executives, you'll play a huge role in the growth phase of StatusPage and land some of our biggest deals to date. Numerous brownie points if you've sold to a technical audience before or understand the basics of web development, API calls, and server infrastructure.
The happiness section about being around people is just one of the points and doesn't even really apply to the whole team. Though I can see it appears to be the main point because it is the longest in length.
The main reason is really that we feel like we'd be more productive if we were together more often.
You know, I considered putting this on my (currently non-existant) personal blog for this exact reason. I talked to several of them and they agree in varying degrees.
That is just one point out of several though so I thought it was fine to add here.
Yeah video chatting is great. I totally see where you're coming from around office interruptions as well. My hope is that we can mitigate those while still having the ability to pair together when we want to. I also think we might not be the best personality types for remote working but who knows.
StatusPage.io helps companies be more transparent with their customers around downtime. Companies like Atlassian, Citrix, Reddit, Cloudflare, New Relic, and Vimeo rely on our product to keep their customers in the loop when their site is down, slow, or otherwise compromised. We're profitable, and believe in running a sustainable company with teammates that help us grow and enrich our lives.
Denver / San Francisco - Rails Engineer
Your job as a Full Stack Rails Engineer is to work on our infrastructure, and sling code for new features. Your domain is server land, rails code, and all of the external services we use to keep the business running. You'll also be in on intimate discussion of company direction and priorities.
San Francisco - Account Executive
Your job as an Account Executive is to help scale our enterprise offering across new inbound signups, existing customers, and prospects. As one of our first Account Executives, you'll play a huge role in the growth phase of StatusPage and land some of our biggest deals to date. Numerous brownie points if you've sold to a technical audience before or understand the basics of web development, API calls, and server infrastructure.