Flexiana as an idea was created long before July 14, 2016, when it was registered.
Before Flexiana, I was a software developer all my life, later also a team lead, architect, Scrum Master and CTO. And I also traveled to companies for years and trained IT management, agile, software architecture, testing, mainly TDD, prototyping, web frameworks, clean code.
I managed to see a lot of companies that work great and companies that I would rather not talk about. And I was constantly developing software, most often information systems or startups, all on the web.
As I was getting more and bigger deals, I started recruiting people and started with a few simple principles:
- Craftsmanship - for me, craftsmanship means quality work, knowledge of tools, libraries and disciplined application of best practices in the area of hard skills.
- Agility - I don't think I know many companies that would be more flexible, more willing to adapt to the customer in everything (including quickly adding or removing people, or completely changing the nature of the service - perhaps you need to quickly build a test framework, or to cover the designer's shortfall), which should from the beginning push for the implementation of an agile methodology that corresponds to the customer's needs.
- Seniority - the best decision I made. At Flexiana, we only have people with at least 5 years of experience. The average is 11 years. And if we feel that someone is not senior even after this time, then we let him go. This is purely the one, most important thing in Flexiana. Without seniority, we could not give people such freedom, expect such quality, use such a non-standard programming language and still have satisfied customers. Without seniority, this would all fall apart immediately.
- Clojure - I want to say up front that we don't just do Clojure. However, the core technology for us is Clojure all the time. It is a great, productive, expressive programming language that has all the advantages of the Java ecosystem and at the same time all the advantages of functional and very expressive languages. And it also attracts smart people. I am extremely comfortable working only with smart people. (note: we are currently working on projects in Rails, Django, FastAPI, C#, mobile development and will start a PHP project, we use all the main clouds+Digital Ocean and on premise, all the main databases, Kubernetes, Docker, etc., we are certainly not one trick store)
- Autonomy - although we have a Handbook (https://flexiana.com/handbook/), we have enormous autonomy in the teams. We don't have any managers and we don't have any team leads. We have no job titles. Instead we have guilds where people learn management skills. We have Gitrevio as a tool for building control over what happens in development. We have a standupbot that records what's going on. We have a culture that leads people to quality, but also productive work.
- Remote, globally, but with a focus on our culture - on the one hand, top people are everywhere. On the other hand, we are working mostly with customers in Europe and North America. We found working mainly with people from similar cultures works very well.
So these are the principles that we have had all this time with minor development. I think we'll still be doing these things in 20 years.
When I mention 20 years, the important thing is that Flexiana is not for sale. Not even for a billion of dollars. On a personal level, Flexiana is our 3rd child. Me and my wife did not have a 3rd child when we started Flexiana (it was the best time). I wouldn't sell my children, I won't sell Flexiana. The only way I would give up Flexiana is if I either get sick or my children don't want to continue with the company one day.
Plus, building Flexiana, building teams, training people, talking to customers, learning and coming up with technical solutions is what I enjoy the most. I can't have a better job than the one I have now.