Why we don't have bosses and offices, and why we work 4 days a week

In 2008, my partner and I completed a degree in computer engineering at a university in Argentina.

At senior courses we had internships at companies such as HP, IBM, Intel. It was then that we noticed a flaw in their work. We could not understand why people without technical knowledge tell programmers what to do, and in addition, they check how they do it.
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Therefore, when we did Project eMT , a comparative search engine for Latin America, we decided to work differently: without project managers. After six years, our team had 34 engineers from Chile, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, and we still work without using traditional structures and work schedules, and our annual growth is 204%.

Without superiors

In large technology companies, we often observed how programmers did something quickly and poorly and received encouragement from management. Over time, this leads to the standard: “do it albeit badly, but quickly.”

Larry Page said: "Over engineers should not be project managers with limited technical knowledge"

On the other hand, as programmers, we were very tired that the authorities arranged meetings at any time when they wanted to.

The developer needs an average of four hours of continuous work for productive activities. Therefore, ideally, the programmer needs to work from 9 to 13, and then from 14 to 18, to achieve maximum efficiency.

If, for example, the boss makes an appointment at 11 am, the morning is lost, because I need to prepare for it, be there, greet everyone, discuss problems, go back to the workplace and continue from where I finished. With all this morning chatter is lost.

Paul Graham - entrepreneur, programmer and founder of YCombinator said: "for a programmer, the cost of the meeting is always higher."

Without office

In truth, at the beginning of the office was not available to us. We just did not have the funds in the early stages for the removal of the office.

This continued until the second year, when we were able to enter the office with all sorts of buns that we had long dreamed of (ping-pong tables, video games, cooks in cafes, a gym and healthy televisions). This stage lasted only eight months, and then we decided to return to remote work, for several reasons.

For a start, the road - no matter by public transportation, or on your own car - took an average of an hour there and an hour back. That is, with a 9-hour working day, we spent 22% of our time on displacement. The cost of the road and office rent was added to the costs.

But economic reasons are not the most important. The main cause was fatigue, which accumulated from these movements. This time could be used much better, for example, to communicate with the family.

Now people from five countries work for us, and we believe that the habit of working remotely will allow us to grow further.

Four-day work week.

Reducing the number of days in the work week is our recent innovation. We have been working this way for the last two years and this turned out to be a great solution.

At the dawn of industrialization, people believed that the more they work, the better the results will be - so everyone works for 5 days and there are only 2 days to rest. In such a technologically advanced project as ours, “more” does not always mean “better.”

We need engineers who are satisfied with the work and motivated for quality performance. We are not interested in quantity, quality is important to us.

This is fully consistent with the goal of hiring the best programmers. Such working conditions allow us to hire the best and as a result we have an extremely low percentage of staff turnover.

In our experience, an excellent programmer solves the problem twice as fast as the average, and with better quality.

In addition, we are tired of hearing about the balance between work and family time. For us, it was a great answer to the perennial problem - now you can spend 50% more time with your family.

Step by step

1. To begin with, we completely refused to meet. All communication is in writing. No calls, meetings or newsgroups.

This may seem inconvenient, but we have been working like this for three years now and this is absolutely normal for us. We read about how a manufacturing company saved the equivalent of about 200 salaries, simply reducing the meeting time to 30 minutes, and the maximum number of people at meetings to 7 - and realized that we were on the right track.

2. No agenda. No one includes meetings in our working hours and does not change our schedule. The work is organized by each of us, on the basis of knowledge and schedules.

Thus, all communication becomes asynchronous. This means that we can program without interruptions, and then, at a convenient time, answer questions.

3. Another important point is that we completely refused e-mail. We are tired of using mail as a to-do list. It was not intended for this, and moreover was not effectively imprisoned for it.

We moved from the historical methodology of kicks (push) to the query mechanism (pull). That is, no one can send me an email with a request to do something. I choose my business for myself.

Refusal of meetings and emails is provided by our internal development, which we call iAutonomous. This is an SAAS class application that allows each team member to participate in the development and creation of new tasks.

Thus, we all see task lists, progress, and can create and participate in tasks to bring them to the end.

With this tool we can see who is doing what now. We do not need a boss who tells us what to do and whether we are doing it right or not. We are all programmers, and we know very well how everyone else works.

Be demanding

I believe that our main feature is the quality of the engineers we hire. Their main property is the ability to be proactive. People who work with us are themselves entrepreneurs - they don’t need a person who constantly checks whether they work.

Inactive engineers harm our work culture. A high-performance engineer wants to work with those who work even more (and better). We were wrong in hiring programmers who did not have such qualities. But after a few days, a maximum of weeks, we discovered this. I advise you not to pull up with a rupture of working relations that do not add up - this is better for both parties. If programmers need a warden, they will find a place in another company, with managers.

I advise you to start with these habits right away - it will be much easier than changing them later.