This. I'm now working at a small- to mid-sized (~80 people) local B2B company. Pay is fine, they offer 100% WFH if you want, but they also have nice offices, they make good and stable revenue with reasonable growth targets, the actual work is somewhere between interesting and mind-numbingly stupid (e.g. integrating with poorly documented enterprise software - can be fun, but can also be aggravating), people are mostly happy.
There is a focus on delivering for clients rather than following processes.
I have about an hour of required meetings a week, 15-30 minutes technical meetings where people bring up any tech roadblocks or things where they need help, and a 20-45 minute sprint planning meeting. There's one monthly "show cool stuff" meeting for the whole company where everybody can voluntarily show something interesting they made. The rest of the time, I'm writing code, documentation, helping coworkers, talking to clients, stuff like that.
There is very high trust, e.g. people make honest effort estimates and there's no punishment or bad feedback if they're missed. There's a wide variety of skills because it's hard to attract top performers. This makes it easy to get hired (they immediately invited me for an interview after I sent them my CV, and made an offer after talking to me for 30 minutes), and it also means there's a culture of helping people and being patient and understanding when people are making an honest effort, but don't quite get things on the first try.
I'm working eight hours a day, five days a week, and when I'm done with work for the day, I don't think about it until the next day. It's nice.
This is exactly the company we've built. As a bonus we have pretty interesting technical problems. I think a big reason our company is like this is because the almost the entire leadership team are in their 40's and have young kids. We care a lot about growth of the company but we've removed all the BS of operating a company so that we can fit it into our lives.
That place sounds great. I complain about more than an hour of meetings a day and am told that is unrealistic. This is a small company with under 30 people. Half of them seem to go to meetings all day long.
If your job is to build consensus for a plan, to collect feedback before committing to a major decision or to communicate progress and agree next steps on anything, meetings are work.
Meetings are work.
I can’t say this enough - not all work can be done on your own in an editor or IDE.
And no, it’s often not just busywork. It depends on the domain you’re in and what level of experience your colleagues have.
If you work in anything touching public sector, you’re going to need a lot more meetings to get alignment on even small decisions than if you work on a trading floor. It’s the nature of the beast and how “compliance” is interpreted by different cultures.
Ymmv. Small companys can change fast culturally and are still figuring out their management layers. Maybe there are some filtering interview questions but this company profile (like any comoany profile) is not a panacea.
Yes, but there's a 99.9% chance they can't hire you, because you live in the wrong country :-)
What I would do is look at local governments, at local municipalities. They often have public calls for bids for software projects, like digitizing some forms or processes. Stuff that's too small for big corporations to care about. Look at the companies that apply for these projects. They're often small, local, stable, and starved for good software engineers.
I worked on a small company similar to what you just described now. We were a group of 15 people inside a Microsoft license seller in South America. But our job was actually related to get those public bids for web systems to help their government processes. If I wasn't being paid close to minimum wage it'd be the best job. The deadlines were almost non existent, the people were nice, even our clients inside the government were very cool to chat with. The company went bankrupt because some scandals and it had to change to something else so I went to another place. But it's a really cool concept that also can be very profitable. 3 medium size projects of that type and I could retire in a few years.
There is a focus on delivering for clients rather than following processes.
I have about an hour of required meetings a week, 15-30 minutes technical meetings where people bring up any tech roadblocks or things where they need help, and a 20-45 minute sprint planning meeting. There's one monthly "show cool stuff" meeting for the whole company where everybody can voluntarily show something interesting they made. The rest of the time, I'm writing code, documentation, helping coworkers, talking to clients, stuff like that.
There is very high trust, e.g. people make honest effort estimates and there's no punishment or bad feedback if they're missed. There's a wide variety of skills because it's hard to attract top performers. This makes it easy to get hired (they immediately invited me for an interview after I sent them my CV, and made an offer after talking to me for 30 minutes), and it also means there's a culture of helping people and being patient and understanding when people are making an honest effort, but don't quite get things on the first try.
I'm working eight hours a day, five days a week, and when I'm done with work for the day, I don't think about it until the next day. It's nice.