skald labs

Values

"It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious [people] is a corporation with a conscience."

Henry David Thoreau

Be a compounding factor

A great professional in isolation has a lot of value. But a great professional that acts as a compounding factor in the environment around them is a lot more valuable.

Being a compounding factor means going beyond the thing that's most visible for you as an individual and that just will push you forward and thinking about the whole.

In practice that means writing documentation and runbooks, so that knowledge that's valuable to others doesn't just live in your head. It means taking on refactors, doing unsexy, and at times "invisible" work that pays dividends down the line. It means collaborating and helping others. Teaching your peers. You should help your peers succeed.

In a culture like this, everyone wins, including you. You will learn more and you will be able to have more impact, both at this company and at other endeavors you might take on.

In practice

Don't burn out

At this company, we don't want you to burn out. We don't want you doing 996. That does not mean you shouldn't work hard, and that does not mean that there won't be times where a bit of extra effort and time will be asked of you.

But pushing too hard in the short term often brings in negative outcomes in the long term. Both for you personally, and for the company. We want top performers to stay around. It's a lot more valuable to have someone stick around for years than cycling through employees every year or two. People who have been part of building the company and watched it grow gather so much valuable context and can be an even bigger compounding factor. We can't have that if you burn out and leave.

From a personal perspective, we all have lives outside of work. We want you to have a life outside of work. That will make you happier and more productive too.

Work is work. Work hard, put in effort, and care. But do close the laptop and spend time with your family, and on your hobbies.

This value might be more relevant now than ever. A lot of software developers who are being accelerated by AI tooling are reporting getting tired more quickly, and pushing their mental bandwidth further than they have before. We want to keep tabs on this. If time shows that we're exerting ourselves more and thus unable to work for as long as we used to while still remaining highly productive, this is something we want to consider as a company and adjust as appropriate.

In practice

Oars were made for a reason

In other words, it's ok to go against the current.

We don't need to go against the current, and we don't need to be contrarian. However, we can, and we should, if we decide that's the way to go. We shouldn't be doing things just because everyone else is doing them, and that applies at many levels, from product to company culture.

We won't jump on trends just because and if others are pushing people to e.g. work more hours and we find that we operate better working fewer hours, then as a company we should be willing to drop the oars, make a decision, and row against the current.

We will be wrong at times. But that's ok. We make decisions based on the best information available and our values, and we live with them.

In practice

Be open

Open is a broad term, and we generally embrace its many definitions. We want to be open-minded and open to feedback. We value open source. And we really value candor and feedback.

As a general goal, we should aim to make a lot of stuff public. This handbook is an example of this. We believe in sharing our learnings and our modus operandi openly in public, as that will attract like-minded people and contribute to important discussions in the world.

Internally, employees should get a lot of context about company performance and direction from founders and executives. We also should aim to provide feedback to others on a day-to-day basis, and create an environment that fosters a healthy culture of giving and receiving feedback. Feedback compounds.

In practice

Create more value than you absorb

Some businesses absorb more value than they create. Honestly, some businesses have unclear value (but they get money by preying on customers), while others might still create value, but they squeeze customers out or have net negative impact in the world to the point that they end up absorbing more value than they create.

We're not interested in building one of these businesses.

On one hand, this value can help guide some decisions about products to launch. And on the other hand, it also determines that if, for example, we need to find ways to bring in more revenue faster, the conversation should always be “how can we create more value for customers?” rather than “how can we extract more from our customers?”.

In practice

Trust in coordinated autonomy

We hire people we trust. We should trust one another to make decisions and employees should be as autonomous as possible while ensuring we're still going towards the same direction as a company.

Autonomy means you can decide what you work on today, and that you have a lot of say in what you work on for the next few months and how that gets executed. However, we don't want to have a culture where everyone just does what they want and we end up being pulled in different directions or having multiple people doing duplicate work. Be autonomous, but just communicate throughout.

It's ok to work alone on something, but we don't want full-on lone wolves. That doesn't compound.

In practice