The Book of Redgate: Hours

I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of company I’d want to build if I founded another company. It’s a great place, and one of the things I appreciate is that we value outcomes.

One of our values is:

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The text on the next page continues the sentence:

What you achieve is more important than how long it takes.

Building software is challenging, and building software that can be sold is difficult. We’ve had lots of successes and some not-successes. However, we work towards building the software and celebrate the achievements.

However.

If you’ve built software, you know it usually takes longer than expected and people want it sooner. Many teams know me as the “do it faster” guy. I know software takes time, but I also know that in the business of selling software, we need focus on things that are useful and valued by customers.

I don’t complain that it takes too long to build everything, but I do press on the focus to get the important things done first, which aren’t always the fun or easy things.

Ultimately we as a company appreciate when we have something done and working for customers. We don’t go back and lessen the importance of the effort because of the time it took. We do look to see if we can do better in the future, which is something I’d hope most software engineers would do.

I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.