At Agileblaze we give utmost importance to ethics and integrity. We have a hierarchy free, open culture where everyone is encouraged to learn. Our people are the greatest strength and asset we have & we continue to invest in people. Over the years, we have seen that the software workplaces tend to me compartmentalised into individual silos with physical restrictions in the form of cubicles, restrictions in terms of roles where “a manager puts everything into the narrow perspective of an excel sheet”. The problem with the approach is the real champions who mostly deal with technical challenges get un-noticed. We want to change the way engineers, developers & designers understand who they are.
How we are trying to bring in the change ?
Every individual posses unlimited potential & just is just waiting to be found. We won’t restrict you. We will open up the doors to opportunities and experiences to everyone. We will provide the training and stand behind you and assist. While talking to developers we have found that in many cases they are hidden behind “managers” & thus never getting to know about the clients, their requirements and the end result is disastrous. Here, the first thing is we trust you that given proper guidance engineers can talk to clients, capture requirements & with the help of experienced peers hack the problems. We empower everyone by providing opportunity for everyone to talk to clients, encouraged to attend community events, discussion groups etc.
Continuos Learning
While not getting into a commentary on technical education, we have seen that encouraging learning has tremendous benefits and we invest heavily on continuos learning and it is a part of our culture. At this point we rely on peer to peer learning and MOOCs to sharpen our skills. As we grow we expect to have learning groups & have a collaborative learning environment.
Innovation Driven
The only way we can stand out as individuals and as an organisation is by being people focused and innovation driven. We don’t do performance evaluations and feedbacks based on the lines of code (LOC) or just the deliverables you managed. We would look into how innovative our people are & we are getting rid of all the software engineers / testers and assortments & replace with !nnovation engineers. So, stay away, if you are not driven by passion, innovation and a drive to create future !
Benefits
We are not industry pay masters, not yet. But thats what we aim in the near short term. Rather than beefing up the profits, at this point we believe that we need to invest in our people and at the pace we are growing, we will be ahead of the rest.
Workspace
We have a open – transparent openfloor workspace, lot of aquariums and fishes, a pantry, a workshop area where one can play with hardware (read wrench, drills and hammers) & a stage for all the up coming rock stars. For those who love doodling, we have plenty of white boards & if you are a master doodler, the walls are “snow white” & one can get featured.
Something we have given attention is avoiding light pollution and choosing paints and other material that doesn’t contain lead, mercury and chromium. Well, not everyone bothers about it, but we do. We also have ample direct sun light coming to the workspace & we are in discussion regarding bringing in natural sunlight to avoid artificial lights as much as possible. Though right now we don’t have a solutions available, we want to control the lights to provide healthy lighting & this is one of the problems we want to hack.
Work timings
Heck, what is that ?! (Apparently the HR has a slightly different view about leaves and timings, so its better not to mess with the HR!)
Network access policy
Well, use as much as you can. We have 3 different backbones providers. Make sure you don’t break the fiber.
BOFH, SDLC.
Sysadmins are dead. no BOFH. As the name indicates, we follow agile practises. Read SCRUM, Kanaban. Most of our work needs fast prototyping to produce MVP with tight deadlines, lot of coffee & hell lot to learn. We use Phabricator for software project management & Asana for task management.
Parking
We have ample parking space unless someone decides to bring a hummer.
Accessibility
An upcoming metro rail station, bunch of bus stops & extra large autos are all over. For the rich, there are taxies too.
Food and Entertainment
As we are located close to a university there are plenty of eatlets & the vicinity of police stations and nocturnal population, its pretty safe to roam around 24×7