[echelon]

> “If you aren't excited about what you're working on, pivot. It's as simple as that. You'll achieve more if you're working on something that feels yours.”

I doubt the rank and file ICs feel this way at all. It's analytics plumbing, and it's all for the sake of the paycheck.

[fdlaks]

Ya I have yet to meet anyone who is passionate about analytics plumbing surprisingly, I’m glad posthog has found the 4 people in the world who truly are.

What this really translates to is the founders saying “we think posthog is our golden ticket to becoming rich in an exit event someday, so don’t mess it up for us”. It’s just not politically correct to say that, so it’s expressed as being “passionate about the problems the company solves” or “working on something that feels yours”.

And if you’re not someone who wants to dance and clap along with the founders as they sing “I’ve got a golden ticket!” on the way to the chocolate factory, only to be left standing behind the gate as they enter, then ya go ahead and pivot because you’re killing the vibe here…

[dartos]

If you’re very product or customer focused, you can be passionate about anything.

When I’ve worked at shops that made products I, personally, didn’t care about, it was always satisfying to see a customer be excited about a feature or be thankful for the tool I’m building.

The first time that happened was when an admin thanked me in a support ticket for speeding up the generation of expense report spreadsheets way back.

[xarope]

I've had finance thank me for writing a perl script that reduced the time they spent on daily (yes, daily) work from 2 hours to 2 minutes (ok, maybe 5 minutes).

Never underestimate the benefit of having the finance department on the side of IT's innovation.

[sibeliuss]

Have you bothered to spend any time looking at their entirely open source product, docs, handbook, etc? There are many different things going on here. A gross and frankly ignorant simplification, considering what they've built.

[fdlaks]

No I didn’t bother to read their documentation after seeing their website was apparently made on Myspace.

As someone who has gone through the roughly 9 hour interview process in the past, was it the docs and open source product that made you want to work there?

[sibeliuss]

At my current job, we use some variety of each tool that PostHog has built. We have analytics, feature flags, session replay, surveys, error logging and more. We spend an astronomical amount of money for these services, and where was that login again? Everything about managing (and utilizing) these subscriptions is inefficient, and coordinating all of these different views into our data is a terrible chore.

As an engineer wanting to build a successful product, I hate the fact that this is how it is. And then there's PostHog, where each of these tools is right there, connected to one another, ready to make my job (and my company's success) that much easier. Being able to work on something that simplifies all of this for others is very enticing.

Combine that with their open-company ethos (check out their handbook), and high-trust/high-performance product-engineer mindset, and yah... sign me up. This is a company that legitimately makes other people's lives easier, and thus makes for better products. Something to feel proud about.