Community Manifesto at Pragmatic Works

I, like many of you have been active in the SQL Server and business intelligence communities for many years. I frankly owe my career to the community at large and wouldn’t be remotely in the position I am without the community. That debt to the community is a debt that I feel I can never properly pay off so I strive to pay little pieces where I can. 

When I started Pragmatic Works, I wanted to bake that same goal into the fabric of our company culture and build a different type of company. I believe that if you give to the community, it makes you a much happier employee because:

• You learn faster and more. The old mantra of learning through teaching is a tenant for us
• You build your personal brand, which in turn nicely builds our company brand

At Pragmatic Works each technical employee must blog once a week and speaks at least quarterly. Those that have held true to this have reaped the rewards of it and have progressed up their career path twice as fast as those who haven’t in our company. Some of those employees have become well known community names and in some cases, SQL Server MVPs due to their contributions.  This metric is also echoed in reviews and bonuses. We further bake this into our DNA with sites like the BI Developer Network (BIDN.com).

Constant Mentoring

Each and every employee is encouraged to learn and be engaged constantly. One way we do this internally is with skunk works projects where each employee has a mentor for a type of technology you’re not familiar with. For example, we may have a database we build where I would do VB.net, mentored by a developer and I would mentor the VB.net developer in SSIS.

Many of the employees that are close to moving to the next level also are assigned mentors to help them get there. We draw up their personal and professional goals and help them get there. Typically architects mentor senior employees, senior employees mentor mid employees and so on. This keeps us quite focused in a world where you have a new client every few weeks and bakes our culture from the top down.

We also do regular speaking training where we try to hone our soft-skills. Each employee does a 5-10 minute session and we kick the rust off any of our bad noise words and focus on slide preparation and delivery. This program has really surprised me. I informally did a few sessions with the employees and a few of our key employees liked it so much, they kept it going without my knowledge every Thursday after hours as an optional group.

Development

One of the things I'm most proud of at work is how our consultants interact with our developers. They are constantly giving ideas to the product developers, leading to a much better product and a more competitive consultant. One item in our company culture is 20% time. With 20% time, on Fridays our developers can work on a pet project that's related to the company, clean up old code or whatever they want. Some really interesting code and architecture has come from this unsupervised time.

The Foundation

When I obtained my first IT job, I was quite fortunate, blessed or lucky (based on your belief) to get the job. It was the .Com boom and if you could turn on the computer, you were employable. At the time, I dropped out of college to chase a career at a start-up and eventually went back to college. The youth of today don’t have the same fortunes that I was awarded based on the year I happened to graduate from high school.

I felt that I must pay back my debt for how blessed I was during this time. Included in our culture is also the Pragmatic Works Foundation, a non-profit foundation that trains and finds jobs for those in the military who are transitioning back into civilian life, those who are unemployed and those who may now have the financial means to get into our industry. We also reserve 2 seats in each virtual class for an unemployed person. We have trained and found jobs for dozens of people over the past few years and nothing gives us more pleasure than doing this. Most of these individuals have gone from an unskilled labor force to making 60-90K in just a few years. The nice thing to watch here is our technical staff compete to teach these classes.

The Foundation also helps us find some of the most promising talent we have ever seen. For every seat in our foundation (up to 10 per month), we have 6 people competing for that seat. They’re some of the most passionate individuals you’ll ever meet because nothing has ever been handed to them and they need to support their family. While we feel we can train the technical side, we can’t train the passion into someone and individuals we’ve hired from the foundation have never left the company and shoot up the career path much faster than others. This is our way of doing corporate tithing and the success of these employees has inspired us to announce a .Net developer foundation as well as a business foundation for sales and marketing.  

The Downside

Contributing to the community just makes good business sense. Due to the community involvement, we’ve seen more sales and much happier employees. There’s of course a balance though. It’s easy to become so absorbed in the community you forget your reason for being in business. In other words, if I went to every event that I really wanted to go to, I would be traveling nearly every week and we’d have a fairness issue with employees wanting to do the same. Unfortunately, budgeting and my time priorities don’t allow this type of participation. Before you make the major leap to full community activism, make sure your company has a policy around how many events each employee is budgeted to do and after that budget is spent, it’s spent.  

The Future Direction

As we grow, we don’t want to lose our way. We’re trying to add into our budget a community allocation where those can have a set budget to draw from for the activities for that year. It keeps us fiscally responsible and community activist at the same time. I’m also looking forward to growing the Foundation even deeper over the years. With the level of focus on the community events that we put on our employees, we hope you don’t get upset when you see an event down the road that’s 40% Pragmatic Works employees! It’s just us trying to pay back an old debt.

PS: We’re excited to hear from you. We’re constantly hiring and are growing more than double each year. If you’re interested in joining us, please email us at jobs@pragmaticworks.com.