Add a blog post: "Uh, I like my job?"

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+---
+date: 2024-12-12
+title: Uh, I like my job?
+rootPage: /blog
+sidebar: Blog
+showTitle: true
+hideAnchor: true
+author:
+  - danilo-campos
+category: Culture, People
+---
+
+I never thought it would happen to me.
+
+I was an ambitious kid, and I always paid close attention to successful people talking about their careers on TV. A lot of folks seemed to love their jobs.
+
+I wanted that someday.
+
+But two decades into my career, nothing had really clicked. I liked *aspects* of some jobs. I liked certain kinds of work.
+
+Still, over and over again, familiar dysfunctions showed up in the workplace. Sometimes I would complain, pitch changes. Sometimes these were adopted, but most times I was dismissed as an impractical idealist.
+
+Or worse: a malcontent.
+
+So I gave up on ever liking a job. Eventually I gave up on *jobs* altogether, hoping to scrape a living from a pile of grit and contracts.
+
+Then I found PostHog. Two months in, I’m still finding the experience to be *extremely weird.* It seems as though everything that made previous experiences of work into bullshit can be solved through **hygiene**.
+
+## Honesty from leadership
+
+It’s an all-remote workplace, with an aggressive focus on writing things down. But that’s basic, everyone knows that advice.
+
+What feels distinct is that PostHog’s small executive team doesn’t exempt itself from this approach.
+
+My experience of the typical job is that executive decision making is a rat’s nest of hand-waving, loose reasoning, and ass-covering.
+
+But my first week on the job, I saw our co-founders writing up some mundane, quarters-long failure of their assumptions, extracting the lesson that could be learned from it.
+
+This sat in a GitHub issue, in an internal repo anyone could read.
+
+Every quarter we all get to read the same income statements that investors do. This is only proper: we are all of us investors ourselves, after a fashion, deferring cash today for equity we hope to increase in value tomorrow.
+
+I got into startups 14 years ago, but I’ve never gotten this degree of transparency at work. Being transparent keeps leaders honest.
+
+## Rigor enables autonomy
+
+I’ve been here two months and no one has made me look at a fucking slideshow.
+
+Slideshows are the refuge of the corporate bullshitter. A means of eliding detail through headlines and text that never quite coheres into an *argument*, and never finds itself as a useful reference in the future.
+
+Instead, I sat down after lunch on my second day to read PostHog’s handbook. It’s public, [you can read it too](/handbook).
+
+From the beginning it lays out actionable, logical arguments:
+
+- The advantage our business seeks
+- How we seize that advantage today
+- How we structure the business to maintain leverage in the future
+
+From there, it breaks into fractal detail for each area of the business. How engineering works, how we approach design and marketing, what you need to know about HR.
+
+*Alignment* doesn’t come from endless meetings and slides. I think it comes from everyone having an independent but accurate understanding of what the business is trying to do, and how they themselves can be part of that adventure.
+
+But getting there takes ongoing rigor, documented in shared artifacts that let everyone learn the business, not just their own job in the abstract.
+
+I know how PostHog wants to *win*, and how to do my part in it. Being rigorous prevents hand-waving from taking over the business.
+
+## 360 feedback
+
+I’m blessed and cursed with inspiring strong reactions from people. Some of them nice! Others more complicated.
+
+It has always been this way. In the typical organization, though, I’ve not found particularly strong release valves for strong opinions.
+
+A quarter into my second job, post-college, my boss blew his top at me, and we both spent a good half hour crying and talking it out.
+
+The alternative is deliberately-designed, ongoing 360 [feedback sessions](/newsletter/how-to-give-feedback) among teammates. 45 days into this job I got to hear candidly what people liked, what people wanted more of, and in a few cases, what people found grating in me.
+
+This gives me information to make better choices. I can evaluate the feedback and decide to lean further into places where my strengths are meshing with the team’s needs. I can make more intelligent tradeoffs between my ambitions and how my style impacts other people.
+
+Instead of being in the dark, I can navigate with confidence. Consistent feedback prevents resentments and poor direction from building up.
+
+## Fluid org chart
+
+The org chart is, in most places, treated like some holy truth carved in stone. It doesn’t readily change, except in calamitous, company-wide ruptures that change everyone’s lives overnight.
+
+Alternatively, you can build teams as [small squads](/handbook/company/small-teams), forming, dissolving, and combining talent as the needs of the business evolve.
+
+Every now and then I’ll look over my shoulder and see a new team has formed, cleaving off from previous work to start a new adventure.
+
+The flexibility has obvious advantages for the business, but for people, it’s an antidote to *stagnation.* The org chart evolves to suit the best fit of people on it, instead of trying to bend them into an imagined shape that doesn’t work. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen burn out because they couldn’t quite manage to become what someone randomly wrote down in a doc 18 months earlier.
+
+Instead, when we notice such a mismatch, a team’s *actual* strengths can be codified, and new teams can be chartered to fill any gaps. This is the luxury of a business that’s healthy and growing: slack in the system to also evolve.
+
+Even better, the org chart is descriptive, not prescriptive. It’s not a declaration of turf.
+
+I got to ship a new feature for our data pipelines product in my second week. *That’s not even my department*. So damn much fun.
+
+## Operational curiosity
+
+It is impossible to know everything in advance.
+
+A common startup failure mode is the tyrant founder who assumes he knows better than anyone else what must be done, what will work, where to go.
+
+But certainty is a trap for anyone trying something genuinely new. Curiosity, meanwhile, is the path to constant opportunity. You can’t know until you try. You can know even more if *everyone* is entitled to try.
+
+So everyone at PostHog is free to try, to fuck up, [to discover](/handbook/company/communication#top-tips-for-rfcs). If I have a strong opinion that disagrees even with a founder, I have the option to give it a swing anyway, if the decision is reversible.
+
+There’s [not an aggressive process](/handbook/values#4-trust-and-feedback-over-process) that dictates what I can do or how I have to do it. I have the trust of my team to make moves, and I’ll get feedback when I get it wrong. We course-correct into the right path through a sort of social eventual consistency.
+
+[Two guaranteed days](/handbook/getting-started/meetings#no-recurring-meeting-days-tuesdaysthursdays) of uninterrupted, *deep work* don’t hurt, either.
+
+Periodically, teams will host an off-site where we get together to catch up and play around with technology. Open opportunity to experiment and learn new things is central, through a sedate and generous block of hackathon time.
+
+In my first hackathon, I got to dive deep into the workings of the product itself. What does it mean that I now know the specifics of doing CRUD operations in PostHog? How will I leverage this additional insight in my role as a propagandist and communicator to developers?
+
+I don’t know. And no one made me pretend to know ahead of time. I just got to have fun and explore.
+
+I can’t wait to find out.
+
+## wtf, right?
+
+I'm trying not to be *too* weird about it. I think my coworkers are getting used to my outbursts about how something makes way more sense than usual.
+
+By month two I’m usually anxiously glancing at the exits. The endless paper cuts of structures that don’t quite work – but still bind the everyday of workplace existence – start to chafe and rub. Instead, I'm busily learning more and making plans for what I'll do next.
+
+I didn’t think they still made startups like this. But the more I think about it, I’m not sure they ever did.
+