My past mentor Andrew Poole has recently accepted a new job and as part of his process he created a 'company spec' - I honestly thought it was a great idea and this post is me going though the process of creating one. His blog post is linked for full reading so I'm not going to list the benefits etc. here. https://forkinthecode.net/2019/07/14/make-your-cv-work-for-you.html

I have started out this exercise by running through my values from an exercise that I did and then taking his two headers and building from there. Some of his wants match perfectly with mine and some don't so what I have is a mixture.

My Values

I recently did an excise about my values with James Goss (UKHO Design Authority). The exercise had come from a management training course about 'credible leading' or something like that that that James had been on.

My values came out as:

  • Relationships
  • Doing the right thing
  • Honesty - (TH)
  • Helping Others - (M)
  • Transparency
  • Effectiveness
  • Trying new things

There are a couple of special ones in there that James determined by asking some questions.

TH - This is my 'threshold' value. That means if I see this value being broken or not fulfilled then it's a big deal to me personally.

M - This is my 'motivating' value. This is the thing that makes me do what I do. For me helping others is what I like to do whether it's helping by delivering solutions to customers or mentoring someone. This also for me links to my top value of relationships as to help others and know that you are helping people you need to have a relationship with them.

When going through the statements below I had my values in mind.

Organisational and team culture

I want to work for an organisation where...

  • Software engineering teams want to develop themselves to work better with each other and across the organisation with the aim of better understanding the customer and how to deliver value for them.
  • Teams do not 'silo' themselves or hide behind divisional lines. People are open to communication and collaborative working to solve problems.
  • Software engineering teams can focus on quality of service whilst delivering at pace. There is a trust between the team and business that quality is balanced with delivery.
  • Being transparent and honest is a core value. The development team provides honest sprint reviews and feedback and doesn't hide failure.
  • Development teams are given space and time to experiment with new technologies and ways of working to get to better solutions and improve effectiveness of the team.

Technology Approaches

I want to work for an organisation where...

  • Keep it simple stupid - the majority of the time the simple solution is the best.
  • An iterative approach is preferred with small incremental releases delivering maximum value to customer.
  • Security is taken seriously. OWASP, NVD Checking, threat modelling is used where appropriate.
  • The most appropriate technology and architecture is decided through collaboration between the development team and the architects.
  • Support features (logging, debugging, maintenance) is built in with the same importance as features.
  • Technical debt is managed and tackled where possible.

Summary

I found it pretty hard to perform this exercise but also very fulfilling. There are so many approaches both technology wise and culturally I wanted to add. I ended up choosing just the ones that popped into my head first as I believe they are the most important to me.