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.

Basic Principles

We expect all Egressive staff to be commited to the following principles:

We focus on developing a positive, ongoing partnership with both our customers and suppliers.
Because we sell trust, we must earn it. This is an ongoing process.
Egressive is part of an ecosystem which includes our families, education system, local and national (and international) politics. We must take an interest in that ecosystem and work to ensure it remains vibrant if we and our customers are to succeed.
We benefit from the work of others given freely. We recognise our moral obligation to contribute back in kind, and we do.
We believe that business success is measured in many more ways than financial profit.
We at Egressive work - and if required, change - to ensure that Egressive is a fun and fulfilling place to work.

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 we've even had 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 - our office has plenty of secure bicycle parking. If it's really crap weather, the bus service in Christchurch is excellent.

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. In addition to commuting via alternative means (not by car) we tend to avoid rush hour - some of us tend to get in early and others leave home just after the traffic congestion eases. 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 (obviously, there's got to be a balance here),
an appreciation for life's simple pleasures like good food, fine wine & beer, 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 a scrumptious lunch in an idyllic location.

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 for real understanding and purposeful 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 and colleagues, discussions wandering amongst topics like programming languages and web application frameworks to the global ramifications of peak oil, Wikileaks, the TPPA, and global warming 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!

Our Priorities

At Egressive, we understand the critical nature of computing solutions to our customers' business processes and work hard to foster long-term relationships with our customers based on mutual respect and trust.

We are a collection of highly competent technical individuals who share an appreciation of free and open source computing technologies and a set of customer-focused priorities:

above everything, ensure the safety of our customer's data
ensure that customer systems are running, allowing them to conduct business.
ensure customers are confident and comfortable with the provided solutions
ensure that customer systems are as secure and fit for purpose as possible
minimise long term risk
minimise short term risk