Hygge Companies hire people not only because they are useful now, but also because they believe in their potential.

Working in a Hygge Company provides an opportunity for extremely efficient and, in many cases, very accelerated, career growth. In particular, it provides an opportunity to broaden your skill set well outside the narrow constraints that careers can have at most other companies. There is no red tape, allowing you to tailor your own “growth ladder”. It operates exactly as fast as you can manage to grow. You’re in charge of your track, and you can elicit help with it anytime from those around you.

Use your personal repository to craft your way forward: use available there resources to set your own personal goals. This is less about tracking you and more about being able to help you with needed resources and to show you shortcuts that worked for the rest of the team. Those issues can be as small as figuring out how to set up a tool or as big as learning a new language. Hygge Companies do not have any strict rules about moving up the career ladder, but acquiring skills in at least one of the skill tracks is essential to your growth.

Engineers: code is only the beginning. If you were hired as a software engineer, learn from people with other skills. Take advantage of this fact whenever possible: the more you can learn about other disciplines, the more valuable you become.

Non-Engineers: program or be programmed. Different disciplines are part of making any product, but any developing industry is centered around data and automation. If your expertise is not in writing code, then every bit of energy you put into understanding the technical aspects of making software is to your (and company’s) benefit. You don’t need to become an engineer, and there’s nothing that says an engineer is more valuable than you, but broadening your awareness in a technical direction is never a bad thing.

Responsibilities and Functional Teams

In growing companies, official titles don’t mean much beyond the public image. Most of the team members wear multiple hats and can rotate from one set of tasks to another as needed. The best way to find out who does what is to click on their GitHub profile and look through their activity (keep in mind that you can see their activity only in the projects you have access to). You can judge their place in the company by the responsibilities they assume on the day-to-day basis.

We define responsibility levels by the ability to manage issues, milestones and epics on GitHub. It might be hard to grasp right away, so we came up with an alpaca farm metaphor.

Wranglers

First level are the wranglers. They tame, control and handle alpacas. Wranglers responsibility area:

• complete individual issues;
• speak up about problems;
• work on getting relevant skills in at least one skill track.

Weavers

Other team members are involved in making the cloth. They have to choose the right material, plan the patterns and come up with ready-to-go products. This job requires a higher level of responsibility and advanced skills in at least one skill track. That is why we have weavers to oversee milestones completion. Weavers responsibility area:

• break down epics and milestones as well as oversee their completion;
• specialize in particular customer segments, products, or technologies;
• independently identify the problems, come up with solutions, formulate them in issues, and oversee their completion;
• document all new tech and business processes.

To distribute tasks effectively and oversee their completion, Weavers rely on their leadership skills.

Tailors

Finally, there are people who are responsible for all the aspects of company’s operations in their respective skill track. They are tailors. Tailors responsibility area:

• work on formulating epics and milestones;
• being an expert in at least one of the skill track.

Hygge Companies encourage everyone to show initiative and take responsibilities beyond assigned to them issues. However, some tasks require more skills than others. Setting clear goals for yourself from the start and assuming weavers and tailors responsibilities is the key to grow in a Hygge company.

Company Growth and Hiring

Hygge Companies do not have a growth goal. They hire the best people as fast as they can. They scale the business as fast as they can, given their existing staff and the long-term vision for the success as a company. Ultimately, everyone wins by keeping the hiring bar very high.

Bring your friends The only way for a company to succeed in a competitive industry is to have great people. One of the most valuable things employees can do is to tell the management who else they should hire. Hygge Companies are willing to talk to anyone who wants to work, regardless of the immediate hiring needs.