Admirable Qualities of a Tech Company

Like any employee, I've noticed working conditions where I thrive, conditions where I have no motivation, and everything in-between. I've worked at Fortune 50's, Bay-Area Startups, companies with 30-year-old codebases, companies with no codebases. This list represents the ideologies of companies in which I've flourished in the past.

• Doesn't use a custom framework, especially one which is closed-source
• Doesn't have arbitrary, tight deadlines
• Values work-life balance
• Contributes to the open-source community
• Allows developers to use their own development machine
• Not being able to do so can be a sign of an overly coupled development environment
• Doesn't require proprietary communication protocols
• Does your Microsoft Exchange server not work with OS X or Linux?
• Has minimal spaghetti code
• Consider switching to a Service Oriented Architecture, it helps ;)
• Prioritizes time to refactor and other things which don't directly generate revenue
• Isn't a “marketing-driven” company
• Throws away the Minimum Viable Product
• Getting an idea to customers quickly is important, but once the idea is validated it's time to architect
• Considers feedback from developers before making large developer-affecting decisions
• Gets feedback from developers before assigning tasks, e.g. point assignment

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript, is an O'Reilly published author, and is an organizer of NodeSchool SF.