Our Culture is not what we say, but it's what we value. Many companies have impressive culture statements. We believe our culture is our strength and guides our day to day interactions. 

High Trust, Ownership and Commitment 

We believe in a high trust culture. While most companies pay lip service to high trust, believe that high trust is good policy. We believe that high trust makes us very very efficient and helps us move forward faster and create value rather than dealing with synchronization issues. We believe that trust works both ways and is not a tool to extract unreasonable work from anyone. In all our dealing, written or verbal commitments are one and the same.  

We also believe in people's ownership. We expect no one to make commitments on your behalf but you. As a company policy, you will find that we don't negotiate on your commitments and delivery schedules. Whatever you commit should come from you with your analysis and not by means of negotiation or leading questions. Questions like “Can you deliver this in 1 week” are considered leading questions and hence not asked. The right question is “when can you commit to delivering this?“ However we expect you to be cautious while making your commitments because further chain of commitments could be based on your commitment. Again this is a good policy because we don't want you to cut corners or burn out or break the chain of commitments. Saying 'No' is an acceptable answer as it helps us come up with a better plan. 

High Performance but Team First 

We promote a culture where people are rewarded for their high performance and also putting the team first. There is a simple logic to this. At the company level what's more important is that the aggregate performance of the company is high. By spending a couple of hours of your time helping someone to get out of a problem and thereby being productive for the rest of the day, we believe you have added far more to the company's aggregate performance than the individual time you might have lost and hence we reward such behaviors.  

Making Mistakes:  

We believe screw ups are a great learning tool as long as you are learning. We won't punish people for screw ups. We live on the cutting edge and we don't believe that you will do things right all the time. However what is important is that you analyze your screw ups and prevent similar screw-ups in the future. What's bad is repeating the same mistake again and again or not listening to your peers and not giving back to the organization a safety hatch to prevent us from making similar mistakes in the future. We admire people who have the courage to admit their mistakes.

Communication

We believe in straight talk when it comes to technical or business matters. We respect employees who never talk in mitigating voices and are not afraid to call spade a spade. However we never communicate in a way that shows disrespect to the individual even if we differ strongly in our opinions. 

Secondly, we strongly believe in over communication rather than under communication. If we know who the final recipient of the message is, we would much rather contact the person directly. We don't believe in forwarding messages through a chain. However we keep all stake holders in the loop. Again, this is just way more efficient and less error prone and things don't slip between the cracks.  

Flatland 

We spend a lot of our energy hiring great people. We don't want to create hierarchies just to manage people. We are not a military organization where someone at the top knows what's the best. However we believe in roles. People play various roles. For example the role of team lead could be to keep the bigger picture in mind, keep integrations in mind etc. Don't consider roles as hierarchies. You are as important as any one else and if you were not then you wouldn't be in. Identify the role you are playing or have been asked to play and play it well. Remember, we hire smart people not to control them but to provide them with an environment and culture where they can produce their best and realize theirs and company's dreams. 

Appraisal  

We strongly believe in rewarding people based on their outcomes and not based on their inputs. We have a comprehensive evaluation criteria but we don't believe in putting people into stack ranks. We would rather group people with similar outcomes/impact together and then rank the groups. This keeps us away from a fundamental problem, where people consider the ranking as their ranking and not the ranking of their output for the assessment window.  

Company Hiring Philosophy 

We hire people who are among the best and in some way better than the existing employees. We hire with the aim that the average talent of the company should go up. 

We hire people who put the team first. Software development is a team support. 

We believe that hiring a bad employee is -1 , i.e. it is going to consume one of our good employees to get to level 0. Hiring a bad employee is like firing a good employee. We believe hiring people that won't fit into our culture is not good for them also as they will not be in a place where their skills will be rewarded. 

Leaving the Company 

Should some one decide to leave the company or be asked to leave the company, we take it in the right spirit and we always part on amicable terms. We consider every leaving employee to be our brand ambassador in the bigger world and going out with fond memories. We thank them for their contributions and respect them for what they have done.