We are a remote-first company, which means that we hire anyplace (in the US for now) and do not have any expectation that employees will regularly come to an office.
The biggest risk of hybrid work is that it devolves into a dichotomy of “headquarters workers” and “remote workers” and that the HQ folks end up with more influence while the remote workers become second-class contributors.
Specifically, there is a risk that at HQ folks meet in person, build special bonds, keep info to themselves, and that everyone who is not at HQ ends up not included, uninformed, out of the loop. This can lead to pernicious situations where HQ workers get promoted faster, have more influence, etc.
We want to avoid this.
We will make sure that leaders of the company (including executives, TLs, Pod Leads etc) are not always working in person. It’s harder for cliques of influence to form without the leaders being present. We do a pretty good job of this.
We will always use individual cameras when videoconferencing, not a single conference room camera and speaker. We also would like Warpers to keep their cameras on by default, unless there is some extenuating circumstance preventing it. This encourages everyone to be present on equal footing in every remote meeting.
We will record meetings that might be of interest to people and post those meetings in the appropriate slack channels.
When getting together for an impromptu jam, either remote or in-person, we encourage folks to post a Zoom link in the relevant project's Slack channel, or the relevant team/sub-team, for non-project work (e.g. debugging a problem).
We encourage folks to take advantage of our visit-a-hub program by sending a reminder every few months for folks who haven’t yet partaken to plan a trip.
When forming pods or working groups, we will assign the best people, not taking account of location. In the short term it might be advantageous to start a pod with HQ-only people, but in the medium term it leads to siloed projects and expertise.
10am - 6pm, whatever your local timezone
This gives us overlap in general from 1pm EST - 6pm EST daily (10am PST - 3pm PST)
Meetings should only be scheduled during our overlapping hours, with the exception of 1-1s.
We should all set "working hours" in gcal so that we get warnings when we are trying to schedule meetings outside of overlapping hours.
As much as possible we will try to limit team-wide meetings to Mondays and Thursdays.