I’ve been doing a few interviews here and there. To spice things up, I’ve been asking something along the lines of: “how fun is it to work here?” Granted, the basic need for working is earning money to survive, having fun is normally not in the conversation, but the answer, or lack thereof, could tell you a few things.

The fun in the question is not only about laughing and having a good time all the time. When I try to look back at the companies I’ve worked for, there are some distinct times that were enjoyable. Enjoyable in the sense that there were challenges that pushed me to expand my knowledge, people to learn from, a close-knit team, a sense of safety and belonging, things were improving… Even in frustrating and difficult times, people supported each other, and, in some occasions, there was a way forward, agency to solve our issues, and we were heard.

I can’t say I’ve had the feeling of having fun in a long while, not consistently for a significant stretch. Maybe it’s an “it’s not you, it’s me” thing. John Culter in a LinkedIn comment wrote the following:

Imagine that indeed! In the past years, beyond the technical aspects, a significant chunk of my energy has gone to “persuasion”. Some efforts worked, some didn’t. I get exhausted of persuading as a way of life. “But Alejandro, the more seniority you have, the more you need to persuade people and create change at a bigger scale!”. Should I persuade you of the need to breathe? That’s how it feels sometimes. I’m not coming into a job as a CTO—with the formal authority—or the boss. So far, I’m just a developer that recognises that many things are broken in the industry and feels the effects in his daily work. This is not about specific frameworks or technologies, it’s about how we work together and our approach to creating products.

There’s always a certain persuasion or change agent thing going on, but I wouldn’t mind being in a place that gets it, at least the basics, so we can all focus on more interesting stuff.

Coming back to the interview question, it’s not extremely difficult to tell when people are enjoying working in their team. They might smile, feel energetic about explaining how they work, they might tell you how supported they feel, not only by their teammates, but by the systems and processes they create, how they’re constantly improving things, etc. Perfection is not the goal, no team or company will ever be perfect:

Interesting links

• IT outage: banks, airlines and media hit by issues linked to Windows PCs IT outage. The topic of the day, caused by a YOLO deploy, with no staged rollout or any good practice for that matter. Unfortunately, knowing how software is built and the incentives in companies, it doesn’t surprise me.

• Design is the art of being wrong safely (Pavel Samsonov). “When the software shipped and failed to help users, the company lost a lot of money and a lot of customer trust. By trying to avoid being wrong at all, these teams made it a lot more expensive to be wrong, and reduced their chances of being right.”

• Product Waste and The ROI of Discovery (Richard Mironov). “[…] product waste is a bigger source of lost energy and frustration and bad customer outcomes and engineering staff churn than engineering process waste. […] Building something that’s brilliant but never used belongs in the rubbish bin.”