[coops]

i'm a site reliability engineer at foursquare sf, and i think it's very accurate. dennis travels to our office frequently and takes the time to meet with each of us individually, even those of us who work very far away from feature-land. when we're meeting i feel super comfortable saying "this sucks and we ought to fix it." mostly we discuss organizational issues; i generally air technical issues in similar meetings with harry (our eng lead, posted above,) because making engineering work is harry's whole job.

i've worked at high-profile startups with founders who are very media-visible before and dennis is pretty special in my opinion. he seems to genuinely believe that all of us employees are important to making foursquare the best product it can be.

[slurgfest]

If only "this sucks and we ought to fix it" were not so pervasively condemned in US business culture, it would be much more pleasant to work in; and there are a lot of things which wouldn't be so broken.

[coops]

similarly, engineers who won't criticize or endure criticism of their own work are seriously poisonous for a company.