Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?
My best experiences, as I think about it, tend to have these patterns:<p>- No Slack for non remote<p>Slack is cool, but I remember thinking that if I needed to talk to someone, it&#x27;s over email or in-person. This really encouraged face to face or email conversation. There was also Skype for remote workers, but if you&#x27;re not doing remote, you could kill Slack. Now that I think about it, Slack is more of a vitamin than a pain killer for non-remote organizations. Slack is great for remote though and love it.<p>- No Agile<p>Ah, I remember when I had my first job using Agile. It was cool the first few weeks and that was it. Again, it&#x27;s not a pain killer, it&#x27;s a vitamin. I had the best time ever just sitting in meetings on Tuesday mornings to demo everything in person then do code review with my CTO after. Talk with the whole team including marketing on what we&#x27;d work on. I loved it. No agile, was completely in the know and performing.<p>- Support with Tools<p>It sucks not having the right tools to do the job. Receiving the appropriate hardware, desk, and software has always been useful and makes me happy to come into the office. It really sucks when you wake up, look at your amazing at home desk, then go to a lousy work desk. Bling out the work desk. You can do anything from getting a top end work computer, a great monitor, an eGPU (may actually save a company money from AWS bills), a DAC&#x2F;AMP (cause devs usually have a thing for headphones and the budget for great ones), or a desk goes up and down and has memory settings and it&#x27;s fast.<p>- Minimum Friction<p>If you get told you need to change up your landing page, change up the tooling, or do a big refactor on something, always take it seriously. Some people marry a concept or an ideal and it can often cause friction between the team. Giving up the consistency and letting others use what best let&#x27;s them get their job done should be given time and thought. All in all: be fluid with company practices and not letting a &quot;mono-culture&quot; take root is usually best.<p>My best experiences have been when a single employee can happily recommend a new way that could radically change the initial experience of a customer or a company culture. The fluidity maximized sales and development.<p>- Wrap up<p>We have so much now with tools that can be categorized as pain killer or vitamin. My best recommendation is to have less vitamins and more pain killers.<p>Note: This is just me though. I know a lot of other people have different ways they prefer to work. This is just me.