The best idea wins
"There are no prima
donnas in engineering."
Freeman Dyson
If you have a great idea and the will to see it through, you can effect great change. Nothing is off limits—we’re constantly looking for improvements in our products, our process and in our people. All voices are equal here—we hire people to have an opinion and be creative. We’re intolerant of politicking, ego, and power brokers. If your idea makes the most sense, that’s what we’re doing, regardless of the seniority or role of the person presenting the idea.
Nothing is permanent
"Successful software
always gets changed."
Frederick P. Brooks
Sometimes opportunities are here today and gone tomorrow. Sometimes a breakthrough on an intractable problem invalidates our previous efforts. And yes, sometimes we make mistakes.
Inventing the future requires detaching yourself from the past. While we ship a couple of polished product families, we’re just getting started when it comes to building the full ecosystem of technology we’ve imagined.
We iterate obsessively on everything we do, always collecting new information about the right way to solve a problem. Existing components and processes are supplanted by new, better solutions as they become apparent. For those who built the thing being discarded, this is a cause for celebration not sadness. Replacement is viewed as success: we have now reached the next plateau of functionality and design and iteration begins anew. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Keep focused on
the mission
"The hardest single part of
building a software system is deciding precisely what to build."
Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man Month
We view software as a means of effecting change in the world, not as an end unto itself. Our mission is to help our users, the people doing the hard work on complex, real-world problems. We do this by writing software that enables effective data analysis against complicated, data-driven problems.
Our work is incredibly complex, touching on computer science, data science, software engineering, public policy, good governance, large-scale distributed systems, user behavior, efficient use of resources... to name a few. It would be easy to get hyper-focused on some small aspect of this large universe and spend way too much time and resources on perfecting something that’s good enough already.
By always staying focused on the problems our users are trying solve, we clarify our own thinking about the right way forward.
Read more about our mission focus.