You start working at the time you want. Most of the people start between 9am and 10:30am. If you get started early, you will see how your colleagues become available in slack. We think that saying “Good Morning” is a good way to start the day — don’t you?. We believe that people should work from wherever you like, as long as you are effective and a good colleague.
We don’t have meetings very often, and when we have them, they are normally 15-min maximum. Rather than doing meetings we prefer to talk about things openly, either on slack channels, on hangouts or in person, most of the times in the middle of an open space.
We avoid micromanagement, so it’s very likely that you will end up having a bunch of GitHub issues that you will have to prioritize yourself within the current sprint. Expect people to let you go on your own, but also expect them to be hard with the Code Reviews.
We work on products that are consumed by millions of people every day. We believe in technology as a tool for solving problems. We work on pretty unique technical challenges (Maps are a very niche thing). We aim for quality but also for pragmatism.
We work on 15-day sprints and have always a detailed roadmap for the next quarter. We celebrate the end of each sprint with a meeting, where we show the work done during the last days, report on business metrics and talk about the latest strategic decisions.
There are no designers in different teams, there is just one design team. No matter if you are a designer or a programmer, be ready to learn both.
On Fridays, you might see people having a beer or even a gin & tonic while working on their leapfrog projects (personal research projects related to the product accelerating some parts of our roadmap).
From time to time, Tech Leads organize a short code sprint outside the office. We prefer houses rather than hotels. Preparing a secret recipe for lunch or dinner gives you bonus points.
Experience has taught us that work-life balance is extremely important. If you work until late expect others to ask you to stop. We want you to enjoy working in CARTO, but also to enjoy important things in life, such as family, sports (we have a secret sports club now), or personal growth. We don’t really mind, we just want you to be happy.
We do — official — performance reviews every 6 months, although lately we have been trying to do 1-on-1 conversations a few times per quarter.
We have been learning how we would like to work since we were a team of 3 (now we are around 40). We fail often, but we keep trying always.
