There are some new additions to the Softwire office. We expect these new recruits to help us with software development, without saying anything!
It’s long been known that the very act of explaining a problem out loud can, by itself, be enough to solve it. So we’re asking our developers to explain their problems (with their code, their customers or anything else) to their duck in the first instance. If this is successful we’ll save a fortune on task managers.
If anyone’s sceptical, my favourite benefit of “rubber ducking” is this one. Rubber ducks don’t gossip about your private problems with other rubber ducks.
Following on from my previous posts about the “clandestine maths club” that has sprung up at Softwire, I interviewed one of the ringleaders – Kenny Hung.
So another week, and more exciting maths formulae posted up on the Softwire whiteboards.
Softwire have always recruited from numerate disciplines. We mainly target computer science, physics, engineering and maths, although we’re not averse to recruiting from other disciplines if we find candidates with aptitude – including to date philosophy, biochemistry, psychology and even classics.
If you’d asked us before we started, we might have guessed that we’d get the most hits from computer science, but it turns out that maths is the modal subject. About 40% of Softwire studied some form of mathematics, narrowly beating the number who studied the more career focussed computer science.
We didn’t really think anything of this until around the middle of last year, when suddenly equations started appearing on whiteboards throughout the office. It seems that the mathematicians are ready to play…
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One of our company core values is that we are “welfare oriented” so we’ve always taken a lot of interest in how we can best increase our employee welfare.
Our first attempt was to buy in an unlimited supply of chocolate biscuits. This went well for a while but as the girth of our developers gradually increased we started to get asked for more healthy options, such as fruit and a cycle scheme so that everyone can burn off the calories from the chocolate biscuits.
This has become business as usual so we were really pleased and surprised to find that we had won the Simply Health Healthy Workplace Award for our efforts.
We acquired a set of actual traffic lights, which are hooked up to an integration server giving our team constant feedback on whether the codebase compiles and passes all our unit tests.
Softwire entered the Sunday Times Best Small Companies to Work For awards for the first time in 2011. (We had previously been ineligible because we were too small – you need at least 50 employees to enter.)
The application process was managed by our very competent Head of New Business Andy Smart, who made sure we had all the forms filled in correctly.
We had to provide details of our policies and basic details about our company, but the main selection is through questionnaires filled out by our employees. This effectively means that we have been awarded the result by the people whose opinion we care about most!
After a few months biting our nails, we heard by email that we had won a maximum three stars, and we were given an abstract number that represented our total score.
We were then invited to attend a management event, where we learnt more about the feedback given by employees of all three star winners. At this event our wall plaque was presented to Operations Manager Zoe Cunningham (that’s me!)
However the position that we had been awarded was kept secret and revealed at a swanky dinner that 4 of our employees attended earlier this year.
As with all such events, the results were counted down from 100. Being the mathematicians and software geeks that we are, we had tried to estimate our position in advance. Best Companies had told us our score, that we had been awarded 3 stars and the “pass mark” to be awarded 3 stars and using this we worked out roughly where we expected to be placed. We were a little way off in our estimate (!) so on the night we were overjoyed as 30 went past, then 20, and we found out we were rated as the 16th best small company to work for in the UK, beating several other well known small software companies (in fact, we beat all other small software companies!)
We celebrated with a private cinema trip to see Machete, followed by a function with champagne cocktails and personalised “I heart Softwire” cupcakes.
Now we are aiming even higher for 2012!
Since my explanation of the charity process at Softwire (read the article here), there’s been a rather strange charity development.
It seems that one of our employees, who has yet to be revealed, has decided that we’re still not doing enough. Going by the moniker of Softwirian (a common way to refer to an unspecified member of the company), they sent the email below plus a $25 KIVA voucher to the surprised members of the rest of the company.
After some initial debate, Softwire seem to have taken the idea on board and we’ve now got a KIVA community page (http://www.kiva.org/team/softwire) with 35 members and $2,100 donated.
If you want to find out more about KIVA, one of our guys found this TED talk (no doubt while Googling frantically to try and work out what was going on) http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jessica_jackley_poverty_money_and_love.html.
Softwirian’s cryptic communication follows.
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