Why this blog ?

Dear reader,

My name is Lou and I have been the Head of Engineering of 365Talents for the past 4 years.

In case you are not familiar with us, we are a startup that develops software in the HR field. I won't go into detail about our mission or our product here, but if you are interested, you can visit our website.

My personal history is that I have been working for SaaS B2B startups for the past 13 years. The main reason I chose to work for a small startup at the very beginning of my career, was because I wanted to have an impact. At the time, it was not cool to work for startups: unicorns were scarce if not inexistent and salaries were lower than in other industries. However, I felt that small companies, despite their lack of clear perspectives, would be a perfect place for me to learn a lot and at a fast pace. I also felt it would be possible, even as a junior, to have responsibilities very soon.

Long story short, the first years of my career were everything I had wished for and I got to have an important impact very soon. However, as my career progressed, this felt less and less true. In fact, as I moved to more senior positions and other companies, I found that I had limited options in my daily choices. I was only dealing as best as I could with constraints.

Constraints would likely be:

• limited finance
• poor consideration of the tech team
• bad morale linked to bad values from the co-founders
• bad previous business and tech decisions that were a burden on the current development

Those constraints were - needless to say - not mutually exclusive and could combine to create environments where it was almost impossible to drive change and to improve the way work was done.

This was evidently frustrating for me whose main responsibility was to drive growth of teams and change. It was even more frustrating when I actually had a team composed of mature, performant, insightful, wise, united and supportive individuals that was asking for growth and change.

During those years, I read a lot of tech books, blog posts and so on that described performing environments and tech teams.

My goal in reading those books, was to leverage the knowledge that others had gathered to improve the performance of my team and, of course, my own personal performance.

However, the more I read, the more helpless I felt. What I was reading always seemed very different from what I experienced at work on a daily basis. I felt really disconnected from the stories told, since it was so hard for me to bring any kind of change where I worked. I felt that things were immutable. Deep inside me, I also started to think that work would always be broken and dysfunctional.

Since I started working at 365Talents, this feeling has completely disappeared.

Do not get me wrong, 365Talents is not a perfect company. Like every other startup, we have challenges, constraints and sometimes we fail. I could tell you that we are building a great product (which we are) or that we aim for flawless execution (which we also do), but I am quite sure that this is a very common goal among startups.

The thing that makes 365Talents so cool, in my humble opininion, is the fact that we try our best and that we are used to thinking before acting. It means that we are allowed to experiment, get it wrong, iterate and therefore learn. It also means that we are encouraged to look for solutions for the long run. In fact, I feel that it is only acceptable to mitigate an issue on the short term if you have a long-term solution in mind. Simply put, we are trusted and empowered.

For me, this has changed everything. It has enabled me and my fellow talented coworkers to test ideas on AI, technical tooling, infrastructure, organisation, leadership, management and more. It has enabled us to think of work not only as a way to produce features but also as a way to generate knowledge: on language, on HRTech, on work organization to name a few.

So today, I feel that we are ready to begin sharing. As a team, it is crystal clear that we have benefited so much from open source, books, conferences and so on. Therefore, it is time to start giving back - at our own scale - and taking part in the discussions in our industry. Of course, the way we work, code etc… might not be exactly right for you. Context, I have learned, is key in those discussions. With that in mind, let's hope that some of the things we discovered along the way, might help you too in your journey.

Happy reading,

Lou