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Sometimes the team decides I need to be closer to the action, where I can overhear more of the details of a particularly challenging project. When that is the case, they move my table right into the mix of that project’s pod of tables and people. Every few months I have to adjust my walking pattern to a new desk location.
The Menlo Software Factory is alive with the hum of conversations and laughter. You can hear work. Our noise is just as notable as our space.
Our flow is team flow, not personal flow. We work noisily with one another. One of our few rules is that we ban earbuds.
The noise you hear in our office is the noise of work.
Bumping into people and getting into unexpected conversations creates opportunities for regular and systematic innovations.
At Menlo, we don’t limit ourselves to specific technical knowledge. Our software developers have experience in a variety of programming languages and readily choose the best technology for a given problem without being biased toward or needlessly faithful to a certain technology. This confounds most in our industry.
Pairing is the foundation of our work style and our learning system. Two people sit together at one computer, working all day on the same task at the same time.
While team members can advocate for a certain partner, one of our goals is to ensure that everyone gets a chance to work with everyone else.
Pairing fosters a learning system, builds relationships, eliminates towers of knowledge, simplifies onboarding of new people, and flushes out performance issues.
Just like the buddy system we learned in childhood swim classes, pairing helps us move into the unknown with confidence and courage, comforted by the safety such a system provides.
Without trust and commitment all around the accountability table, accountability doesn’t produce results.
A worker has a right to know what is expected of him or her, and the clearer that is, the more joy the employee will have when getting it done.
