Ethics and Principles
Egressive is a business founded on basic principles - strong personal ethic, trustworthiness, providing real value, enjoying life, and exercising passions. We're not overly motivated by money. As such, we might behave in a way that might be somewhat unexpected for some people. The following is an attempt to give you some insight into what makes us tick.
The Greater Good: environmental consciousness and conservation
We at Egressive (and within the Effusion Group as a whole), share an interest in conservation. Most of us have a love for the outdoors, with trampers, surfers, rock climbers, kayakers, alpinists, and even search and rescue participants among us. We constantly look to improve our social and environment practices, such as minimising waste. We endeavour to use less stuff. When we do use stuff, we make the extra effort to avoid it going into a landfill: we separate paper, plastic bottles, and other recycleables from other rubbish, reusing bottles and paper whereever possible (so apologies in advance if you see us scribbling ideas on the back of a piece of scrap paper). Furthermore, we do only a minimum of printing. In addition to minimising waste, this practice also reduces costs for consumables such as paper and printer ink.
We also place a high priority on energy conservation and personal fitness/well-being. Nearly all of us cycle or walk to work rather than drive - Egressive maintains no parking spaces for employees as we want to encourage this beneficial behaviour. If it's really crap weather, the bus service in Christchurch is excellent, and the central Bus Exchange is handy to our office.
In an effort to provide further incentives for minimising energy use, Egressive accepts applications from employees for grants to support energy saving capital improvements such as solar water heaters, heat pumps, and insulation.
Work Ethic
Rather than compete unnecessarily with the normal surges of activity within our society, like the scourge of morning and afternoon rush hours, we prefer to adjust our practices to fit into the gaps. For example, we have a policy of leaving for work at 9 am, with the realisation that we'll get to work more quickly and with less irritation (and contributing less to the general congestion of the roads), arriving at work only a few minutes later. As a result, the official starting time at Egressive is approximately 9:15am, and we tend to finish around 6pm unless we've got a major project deadline or something that requires further time, in which case, we do what it takes to get the job done. If anyone requires urgent contact outside of working hours, we can always be contacted by email, mobile phone, or a variety of other means including instant messaging and IRC as most of us have highspeed access to the internet outside the office as well as in.
Due to high degree of technical savvy amongst us, we tend to be able to access important communication from whereever we are - being at the office isn't as important as it used to be... Also, a lot of our work is incident or project based - as a result, we can usually offer very flexible time for those of us who need to be away from the office for some reason. Due to the ethic of Egressive people, we're in the lucky position that we're more likely to have to send people home or tell them: "dude, you need to get out more", than worry about whether they're dead wood and not doing enough to earn their way.
The bottom line: we work ferociously, and we compensate for that by playing equally ferociously. We enjoy what we do.
Characteristics
Although there's a great deal of diversity among Egressive's crew, as a general rule individuals working with us at Egressive possess a set of common characteristics, and we look for these in all new employees:
- fundamental affinity for software and technology,
- an appreciation of the free and open source software culture,
- a basic good nature, thoughtfulness,
- community minded - embracing the concept of ubuntu,
- complete reliability/trustworthiness,
- attention to detail (e.g. good grammar, appropriate dress) - tidiness and almost obsessive consistency (this generally only becomes important to those who, at some point in the past, have been forced to work with someone else's untidy, uncommented code),
- constructive curiosity and energy to "try stuff" - most of the world's most interesting innovations have been the result of somebody just "foolin' around" when they were supposed to be doing something else,
- an appreciation of simple pleasures like good food and a well extracted coffee.
In return, we at Egressive believe in rewarding each other for extra effort, generosity, and the results of "fun hacks" which might have useful applications. Rewards typically take the form of food, beer or coffees although cash bonuses are awarded on occasion.
Our Motivation
Egressive is first and foremost a collection of talented people. It is the colour of the shared culture to which each of us contributes his or her part. We come from many backgrounds with distinct personalities, but we share a few fundamental traits on both technical and interpersonal levels: a love of understanding and accomplishment, admiration of generosity, cleverness, elegance, and honesty.
We all endeavour to avoid artifice, poor design, bad coffee, and proprietary lock-in. We enjoy hooking into a new challenge, a good lunch with friends/colleagues, discussions wandering amongst topics like programming languages and web application frameworks to the global ramifications of peak oil and global warming to the outrageous price of beer in Nordic countries with socialist economies and high rates of alcoholism to the callous indifference and disdain with which many Christchurch drivers seem regard the road code and all cyclists. Honk if you're with us!