Dear Loommates,
The last time we laid out our engineering core values, our team was 6 people including myself. We now have 37 people in engineering. At the time, 2 core values were enough. When it comes to culture, the less we have to remember, the better. These are principles we should be able to easily recall to disambiguate how we should behave and design our systems. How we behave and how we build determines our happiness, and our happiness, in my opinion, is the best gauge of cultural success.
At over 6x in team scale, I propose we modify and extend our core values so they serve us in this new chapter. These values should be discussed so we can feel confident in committing and owning them (check out the last section of this document). The work we do together now is going to affect the lives of people who enter this company for many years to come. Let's set ourselves and the future Loommates up for success by building a kick ass org and use these values as the guide to doing so. Let's also do this early when it counts. As we get bigger, it gets harder to reverse behavioral momentum. Our team has grown a lot, but we are still early and small enough to reinforce the behaviors we want to see new Loommates embody down the road.
I propose we modify our engineering core values to be the following. Each of these core values are backed by behaviors I've seen across the team that I would either like to see more of or correct for. They are not random, and any suggestions made by the group should be backed by experience (either at Loom or previous companies).
The previous definition of Accountability was as follows.