Can confirm Lightcone is very chaotic and sometimes works heroic hours, and it seems tangled up in our way of working for reasons that are not super clear to me.
So when reading your comment I was asking myself why the above template couldn’t be run by a project that wanted to work closer to 40 hours rather than 80 hours per week? One answer is that “Well, if people are importantly blocking elements, they must be available to reply on slack and unblock other people whenever”, which is mostly true for us, except that 1) we almost never wake up people who are sleeping :) and 2) if people sign-post they are taking a rest day or going on vacation others usually try fairly hard to find a way to solve problems without contacting them.
I agree that most of these rules could smoothly transition to a less intense team, and nonetheless believe a less chaotic org would write a fairly different document, which is why I think it would be useful for them to do so.
One thing I can speak to a tiny bit is a software company I worked at that had a lot of the chaotic/hero-ness in certain roles, but absolutely had to be cross-continental, and thus was also remote and heavily asynchronous. It built up really great practices for documentation and async communication to make that work. Alas it’s been too long since I worked there for me remember specifics, so I can’t say anything useful.
I don’t feel that we’re especially “chaotic” or would describe us as a chaotic org. We have lots of structure and process and principles and intentionality in how we operate. Though I suspect there’s something real you’re thinking of.
Oh fwiw I think we’re quite chaotic. Like, amount of suddenly changing priority and balls sometimes getting dropped because we took on too many things.
(Not sure we’re that chaotic for a startup, but startups are already pretty chaotic)
Can confirm Lightcone is very chaotic and sometimes works heroic hours, and it seems tangled up in our way of working for reasons that are not super clear to me.
So when reading your comment I was asking myself why the above template couldn’t be run by a project that wanted to work closer to 40 hours rather than 80 hours per week? One answer is that “Well, if people are importantly blocking elements, they must be available to reply on slack and unblock other people whenever”, which is mostly true for us, except that 1) we almost never wake up people who are sleeping :) and 2) if people sign-post they are taking a rest day or going on vacation others usually try fairly hard to find a way to solve problems without contacting them.
I agree that most of these rules could smoothly transition to a less intense team, and nonetheless believe a less chaotic org would write a fairly different document, which is why I think it would be useful for them to do so.
One thing I can speak to a tiny bit is a software company I worked at that had a lot of the chaotic/hero-ness in certain roles, but absolutely had to be cross-continental, and thus was also remote and heavily asynchronous. It built up really great practices for documentation and async communication to make that work. Alas it’s been too long since I worked there for me remember specifics, so I can’t say anything useful.
I don’t feel that we’re especially “chaotic” or would describe us as a chaotic org. We have lots of structure and process and principles and intentionality in how we operate. Though I suspect there’s something real you’re thinking of.
Oh fwiw I think we’re quite chaotic. Like, amount of suddenly changing priority and balls sometimes getting dropped because we took on too many things.
(Not sure we’re that chaotic for a startup, but startups are already pretty chaotic)
(Campus team seems much more chaotic than LW team tho)
high frequency?