2 weeks working inside Silicon Valey company.
PS: March 6: Text update to be more reliable, there is pt-br version.
In this year I moved out of the country and start in a new job in an overseas territory, a startup in Silicon Valley with HQ is in San Francisco and office in Dublin, Ankara and São Paulo, Udemy is the biggest marketplace of online learning. I stayed in SF for two weeks, working, learning, visit other companies, meetups and take time to explore the city. This text will focus only on the business, cultural and professionally points of view about the Silicon Valley’s Companies, skip the tourism details.
Maturity, mentality and focus, Silicon Valley way to work.
It's really different, how they are organized, thinking, have different robots, machine learning, this it did not surprise me, it was expected, but how people think and make decisions, this caught my attention, it's different at all from that I had seen, or even read.
At first everything is an apparent novelty, but when we remove the lenses of excitement not everything is perfect, the environment did not seem healthy with a focus on quality of life, but taking into account that data-driven, marketing 3.0, sprint design, and among other innovative ways of mindset were born of companies and great minds residing in the Valley, I can say it is common sense that it is a place where things happen!
Effects speeches, without action
Every CEO/leader in any company in the world think it the best, at least tech companies, advertising agency, a new startup for HR ERP cloud, take buzz phrases to push through employees and speak loud, but how many companies reality knows what are they saying? Who knows what are they doing?
We are a horizontal and self-empowered company; therefore all projects need to be approved by THE director.
Being horizontal and empowered is not for everyone or every place, and it’s hard, take time and maturity. Horizontal means, each team is auto enabled to do, and doing, and will do everything by itself, the point is, if need to approval, checked or anything, the empowered don’t happen in or fully effects.
Silicon Valley companies understand it and, indeed each engineering, hr, selling are self-empowered, director doesn’t take micro and medium decision, is more like a judge when needed, each team know what need to do and how, this isn’t a choice, but is a level of maturity, made by right hire decisions and right internal actions.
These are the best part I have seen here, really self-powerful team, happen in synchronize, hard to understand how and where to happen.
We are agile, SCRUM it is our second name, the source of all evil is the commercial department.
How long time to realise, agile it's for everyone, to be agile is a cultural way to do business, can be applied to commercial, HR, selling teams, engineers for everyone. It’s regarding communication, way to organize, to point out the mistakes, to take a decision.
Customer first, up until the budget finish
Smart companies usually lost money in short time aiming a long time, easy to hear hard to put in practice, must be brave, very brave. I can count with my fingers how many companies I worked are brave. How many companies really have a cultural aiming to be healthier and better? I talk about engineers decisions, marketing decisions and the most important, cultural decision. It’s hard to stamp out bad cultural behaviors, and short time decisions probably are one of the hardest to polling off.
Isn’t is the technology, but how the company way.
Use Kubernetes and react doesn’t tell anything about your company, I tired to see job position with, “we use x, we are a modern company like Google”, oh man Google it’s not Google because of their language technology or free food. Companies would like to get the same results of Google but don’t like to think like a Google. One point I would like to advise regarding results and behaviours, the world “wants” it’s different “to being”. To want to be creative, it's different to be creative (to want maybe be the start, but not the end).
Engineering team it's not the only team need to be agile but in all company layer.
My experience, spend many efforts to be more agile and efficient, change a culture, doing a meeting with lots of names (grooming meeting, daily meeting, bla…bla meeting). However when I have seen a selling and design work together in the same sprint with, the same goal, burning charts, everything I choked this it’s different, cultural way to conduct working, now I can realise how it’s important to be agile in every layer, department and teams.
- HR
Yes HR is a team, and be a part too, can bring peace of the heaven or war of the hell. When I see the guys using confluence to document all processes at the same way and worry as I create doc for my software, I realise, here it's different, for new hires the onboarding is a very straight forward process, when I start the HR automatic create some task, with everything described into Confluence. I did my relocation with a few questions, and very straight forward, take my work permit, benefits, understand the tax government in an easy way.
I see HR working in a hackathon, delivering thinks, doing daily, and sprint meetings, try to be better every and every day. It’s not perfect, lacks happen, mismatch contracts, hiring a wrong people, others points really need to be improved, but much better in comparison with previous experiences.
Design (UI, taxonomies) + Engineering
Hard to explain, For everything how to handle with the interface of customer and product need to have the maturity, this is the best fuel. The curiosity is, I don’t see any particular thing or doing only the way has to do, but only to understand the maturity and communication between teams. It’s the same companies and the same director, bring the design team to sprint planning with the engineering team and share the same way to work, usually decrease the frictions issues. But never work, right? Yeap it’s true, however, to work around, it’s an only one generic word, maturity, how we can increase the maturity? the answers will have in an outer post but I can say a tip, create a culture of empathy.
In the same way, DevOps/Agile/Management 3 will not resolve cultural issues, who knows what is agile or devops?
Cultural diversity, exist?
The reality is there are only men in tech companies, I’ll can change the term, there are only men in tech mediocre companies.
Let's try to talk about diversity, the rule of thumb, diversity environment tend to be more "creative" and "innovate", the sentence has own truth point, therefore there are outer benefits much more important.
Multicultural environment usually is made and create by "open" mindset people, which means, lower competitive frictions between teams and person, minor issues did by politics/gender/religions positions and more proper environment. I did not say these “open mindset” team will create a perfect ethic place, and we have a various example like harassment sexual scandal inside of high manager layers on top/example Silicon Valey companies, protest against China market and outers weird things.
The big concern I have for multi-environment if your company don't have mature to be "diversity" carefully, issues with strong religions/politics positions, language bottlenecks, and expensive relocation cost can be perverse.
Everything it's not a rose garden.
Of course, these companies aren't a rose garden.
Extreme self-promotion
One thing I realise is extreme self-promotion, repeatable and excessive. These companies love to do self-promotion internally and externally, make conferences, meetings, retreat and many things to show a perfect world, sometimes making internally and externally an idolization get to the point to create names for how belongs to the circle, you can follow a rule: MyCompanyName + er or ite.
If you think self-promotion isn’t only for clients but used for employee, show how its good work on the company, how lucky you are to be here. I don’t know it is good or not, but can be a trick for freshers, they dream a lot and when reality came, holy shit, big companies, big problems.
Far away to be perfect
Far, far away to be a perfect, healthier, and peaceful place to work. If you do a fast search can have a lot of news regarding a fast pace style work, hard concurrency, struggling by politics stuff and bad managers. Big companies have had and will have big problems, it’s hard to scale without cultural friction, without political skills and without disappointment people, each one is unique, as advances and disadvantages, statistic speaking is impossible for all to be happy in same environment and culture.
Reminder an important rule, alone I go fast and together we go far, not necessarily fast.
This is a part 1, the next part I will talk about, machine learning and data drive in everywhere, San Francisco entrepreneur centre, US support and how it be a software developer in Silicon Valey.
