This repository contains the various MayaData Culture Guides/Handbooks and is the central repository of guidance for how we run the company. As part of our value of being transparent, our handbook published in this repository is open to the world. We welcome feedback. Please make a merge request to suggest improvements or add clarifications. If your question is not covered here, please use issues to ask questions.

Scope and goals

• The documents here should expand the MayaData secret plan for world domination and convert the plan into a culture we aspire to achieve as well as concrete actions to implement and measure adoption of the culture
• The documents here are expected to bring all the leads and the entire company onto a common understanding and provide a guiding framework for day-to-day prioritization decisions.
• The main culture changes we want to bring in into the company, mainly in engineering with the focus on the lessons learned from previous product development and stay ahead in terms of features and quality
• One of the key aspects of the company is people and the kind of people we bring in. These document define the details for retaining existing members, hiring new team members, and how to insure that the work environment for all contributors is one in which they feel able to make an immediate and measurable difference.

Culture definition

Culture is a framework that is used for day-to-day interactions and decision making. When in conflict, the culture established and accepted is used to resolve differences.

Why are we writing this document?

Culture can be a secret ingredient that increases user adoption, product quality, employee engagement and well being. By writing down our shared assumptions and aspirations about our culture, we hope to improve and sustain our culture as our company grows and transforms to better address user needs.

History shows that employees either leave or really invest their best selves into organizations depending on the culture. Our values help us to prevent the five dysfunctions.

• Absence of trust (unwilling to be vulnerable within the group) => prevented by people first, specifically kindness
• Fear of conflict (seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate) => prevented by openness, specifically directness
• Lack of commitment (feigning buy-in for group decisions creates ambiguity throughout the organization) => prevented by openness, specifically directness
• Avoidance of accountability (ducking the responsibility to call peers on counterproductive behavior which sets low standards) => prevented by winning, and openness
• Inattention to results (focusing on personal success, status and ego before team success) => prevented by people first and winning

Our Mission:

We want MayaData to be the preferred place to work for engineers, computer scientists, community advocates and others that believe in our company mission to limit cloud lock-in while providing higher levels of control of the data layer to DevOps teams. We recognize that in order to achieve our mission we have to be the best team possible at building and running the right software based solutions to our customer’s problems. We commit to always working to improve MayaData - and ourselves - to delight our customers. Our culture plays a key role in achieving this mission.

Specifically:

• When we talk about the best team possible we emphasize that we expect high degrees of collaboration and teamwork; if you cannot work with a team with multiple cultures with high degrees of sensitivity then we are likely not the right place for you. We seek to be the preferred employer for the best contributors in Bangalore and other markets in which we hire.
• When we talk about building software we emphasize that we focus on the productivity of our engineering teams and will be relentless in improving their ability to respond to customers quickly. We will aggressively seek to continuously improve our CI/CD and operations abilities for example.
• When we talk about running software we emphasize a DevOps approach so that if you write the code, you support the customers and you lead efforts to fix any bugs.
• When we talk about the right software we emphasize listening to users. We believe everyone at MayaData can learn from users and customers and that the best learning comes from users actually using software as opposed to simply talking about it. In order to learn from internal users, we believe in dog fooding which is the practice by which we will always use our own software if it is at all applicable to our use cases. Development environments, staging, and CI/CD and of course operations should all be based on OpenEBS and OpenEBS Director.

Our Pledge:

We stand by our PLOW values, tactics and metrics defined in our PLEDGE. Our PLEDGE is a framework for distributed decision making, that empowers each of us to determine what to do without asking our manager.

Credits and Inspiration

GitLab Handbook is a true source of inspiration for anyone praticing the Open Culture. We have developed our handbook by our own experiences, as well as those mentioned in the GitLab handbook which directly reflect our PLOW culture. Another great source of inspiration and a must read are The Open Organization book series by Jim Whitehurst.