About
Most bad systems are not broken. They run as designed, hit their targets and pass their audits — for someone. The useful question about any system is not whether it works but who it works for, and the answer is rarely everyone standing inside it. Take a support queue measured in response time: it serves the dashboard, not the person answering and not the person waiting.
A better design follows two rules. Build on what people are good at instead of forcing them into work they are bad at — people are superb at conversation and poor at being a waiting line. And inform rather than control: a warning that something looks wrong is information, while a tool that polices how someone works is control wearing quality's clothes.
Neither rule can be settled from outside. A written plan is a snapshot of what someone understood on a Tuesday, and by the time the work is finished the world has moved and the snapshot is a fossil. So we build the smallest honest thing, put it in front of a real person, and let what comes back change the plan — steering by what we notice, rather than by what we predicted.
We hold the same standard for ourselves. The company is a system too, we are the people who depend on it, and it is meant to get better at getting better.
Everybody should be treated like an adult. Here that means you are handed a problem and trusted to solve it your own way, and nobody is counting your hours while you do. In what we build it means software that tells you what it knows and leaves the decision to you, because the person doing the work knows things the software never will.
The tools you depend on should answer to you, not to the company that made them. So you can run our software on the computers you already own, and keep your work where you can reach it. You get the source code, the instructions it is built from, to read and to change. If we disappeared tomorrow, none of it would stop working.
People spend a quarter of their adult life at work. We believe that you should have a real say in your work life: what the company takes on, how the work gets done, and what happens to the money it earns. If a decision affects you, you have a say in it.
Imagine saying "I broke something", "I do not understand this", or "I need help", and watching your teammates turn up to help. That is what working here should feel like, and creating it is the job of whoever is in charge. Leaders go first and say these things out loud themselves, so that by the time you need to, it is already an ordinary thing to say.
Somebody worried about money cannot do their best work. So we take that worry off the table: pay starts at a living wage for your city, nobody loses their job for not being good enough at it, and when times are hard we would rather everybody suffered a little than anybody suffered a lot.
We understand that people are parents, caregivers, friends and neighbors, not just workers. Everybody gets one life, so we want you to make the most of yours. We are people too, which is why you get what we would give ourselves: time that is genuinely yours, and a job built to leave room for a life outside work.
Through learning we flourish. Nobody arrives knowing everything, and a job here is meant to leave you better at your craft than it found you. You get work that is a little beyond you, and somebody beside you while you learn it. A trade stays alive by passing from one person to the next, so teaching is counted as work and paid as work.
Founder
I'm a software engineer and the founder of Kybernetic Systems. Although I work in tech, I don't believe that technology is the answer to everything. Just because we can build something doesn't mean we should. For example, I don't think using drones to deliver food is a good idea. I want to build technology that brings people together, and makes life better rather than busier.