Larry Page, founder of Google said on several occasions: “A programmer shouldn’t be supervised by a person with limited technical knowledge.”
Think about all the times when your boss called you to a 1-hour long meeting where nothing got solved. On a TED Talk, Basecamp CEO - Jason Fried - shared his theory of working: the office isn't the best place to do it.
I have worked with many tech teams and as an engineer working for big international corporations like Intel and IBM. I can share that I agree with many of the points mentioned in Fried's TED Talk. The office space created daily unhappiness and disconnection with our bosses.
When I started my own company 8 years ago, my team and I decided to create a work environment without bosses. We started growing and we were around 36 developers. In order to succeed, we implemented the following 5 principles:
1. Employ people that are proactive
As Stephen R Covey, author of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" said: “Give people orders and you will generate dependence. Give people objectives and you will create independence.”
We work with people with entrepreneurial mindset. We hire people who don't need to be controlled or be told what to do to effectively be productive. Our company is transparent and has defined clearly our goals.
2. Look for passion and excellence
Being proactive is not enough. To be able to work without bosses, there’s an aspect that is not negotiable: to truly be excellent at what they do. Your hires must undoubtedly love their job.
When we hire new programmers for our startup, we make sure that this is absolutely true. How?
Though it may seem simple, this aspect comes to light very easily. People who love what they do reflect it in a direct way in the degree of passion with which they talk about what they did in their job.
With engineers, we check their open source projects to see what are their interests and passions.
3. Work environment is essential
Providing a favorable environment in which employees feel comfortable is the third step.
For many years, I’ve seen Google and Github's offices and their incredible designs make me want to work there too. I feel excited. But based on our experience, I totally agree with Matt Mullenweg, WordPress Founder, who said: “The best office is NOT having one.”
Our startup works completely remotely. There are no offices. We provide our employees the freedom to choose where they feel comfortable working.
4. No more meetings needed
We don't have face-to-face and online meetings anymore. As developers, we've seen that an average of 4 straight hours of work has reached the best degree of productivity. I believe that meetings are the worst enemy of effectively productive people as it causes distraction.
5. Get rid of emails
We have completely eliminated emails, except when we communicate with clients. The outcome of this policy was very unexpected. It's been 4 years and we haven't gone back.
Over time, email became a list of tasks. People were spending more time reading and replying emails than actually working. As a replacement to email, we've developed an internal tools that helps us control our projects and tasks.
With the huge advancement of technology to communicate and organize ourselves efficiently, it is totally viable to work without bosses. The problem is that we are so used to the traditional work methodology that it’s not simple to see new opportunities to communicate.