This is the tale of how one guy accepted a job offer at a professional services shop that builds SaaS products on the Salesforce platform. It starts in paradise, rolls through a sweaty yoga class, and ends with a realization.

Part I – an Odd Offer

The Set Up

I was sitting on my black roller bag suitcase, waiting behind a line of people eager to get moving on this Paradise thing, and I tapped out an email to Jeremy Engler, CodeScience’s Director of ISV Product Management with the subject line “In.”

Jeremy emailed back in ten seconds “(expletive) yeah.”

I responded: “Can I call you in a little bit? I’m in a rental car line.”

Jeremy: “You misspelled ‘hell.’”

I showed this exchange to my wife, and she grinned. “I think you made the right choice,” she said.

We were in the Hertz line at Lihue airport, Kauai. As rental-car lines go, it had the misfortune to be incredibly slow, but tempered by the joy of being open to the air, with the requisite swaying palm trees. Accepting an offer from CodeScience was the last real-world thing I had to do before losing myself for a little while in the land of cliffside tropical vistas, shave ice, enormous waterfalls, and easy-access mangos for breakfast. 

I try to unplug when on vacation. It’s much easier to do this after dropping your phone in an inlet whilst exiting a kayak, so I hadn’t checked messages in some time. When I got home I had an email waiting from CodeScience founder Mike Witherspoon.

Subject: How do you feel about yoga?

Body:  And starting your first day at 7:30?  Yoga Tree on Stanyan Street has a great power flow class.  See you there on the 11th?

I hadn’t done yoga in over twenty years. I responded “see you there.”

I wasn’t scared at this point. More…bemused. Meeting the founder for a yoga class felt like 2006 San Francisco instead of 2016 San Francisco – a throwback to a time when the city was still a weird amalgamation of hippie ideals and future vision. Pre-techbro, if you will.

An OM Encounter

I was a bit early, as was Spoon – he walked barefoot across the floor with a redheaded grin and a ready handshake before class got going. Yoga was a bit harder than I remembered it, involving poses that I vaguely recalled as easy, but now involved popping joints and beads of sweat dripping from brow to eyeball. 

After yoga we went to breakfast and got to know each other a bit. Spoon is a Burning Man devotee with a ready smile, the type of anything-can-happen dude that makes you think about putting your passport in your pocket before meeting up with him for just one drink. At no point did we talk business, my responsibilities, or anything other than who we were, where we came from, or observations about being in San Francisco in 2016. 

At this point I was a little bit confused, a little bit wary. What was this company? What were they trying to do? I’d taken the job because I liked the work, the vibe, and the people, but I couldn’t pin down specifically why. It took me a while to figure it out…

Part II – Six Months Later

What really sets us apart is our talent…

We have the best resources in the space…

People are the heart of our business…

If you’re reading this and you work in technology, you’ve heard these phrases many times, that it’s almost white noise in the recruiting process. But what does it actually mean? To take those words as seriously as an avocado shortage in San Diego? To work somewhere that cares deeply and thoughtfully about its people? It’s not just perks, flexibility, bonuses, career development, or ping-pong tables – although all of these things can be surface symptoms of an organization that gets it. It’s a mental thing, it’s an attitude, it’s…

It’s giving a shit about your employees as humans. 

That’s the secret sauce, and it’s both the simplest and most complicated thing that I’ve discovered in my time here. 

How to give a shit about your employees as humans – some personal examples from my time at CodeScience:

  • Before big holidays, have the CEO insist that people spend their time with friends and family. Multiple times. 
  • Celebrate joy and acknowledge pain. At CodeScience we’ve seen marriages, deaths and births, to people inside the company, former employees, customers, and friends. We send flowers to the bereaved and baby costumes to the new ones. There’s no ego in either because that’s what people and organizations should do: acknowledge humanity in all of its wonderful and horrifying ways.
  • When there’s a problem, talk directly and fast. Without getting too detailed, I did a couple of things a few months in that did not put my best foot forward with a customer – I screwed up. Two folks here talked to me directly about it, then followed up. Not super-comfortable in the moment, but great for me and everyone else. Passive aggression kills culture.

This core value is reinforced from the top, sides, and bottom. Weekly at company meetings, and daily in the way we work with each other. That’s our culture, and our culture fountains from this core value. 

The Golden Truth

Looking back to those first conversations, where Jeremy and Spoon were so happy to have me join…After six months I know where it came from, and I understand what they were trying to do.

They were looking at me more as a person than as a resource, and were happy to have someone new to celebrate, collaborate, and perhaps mourn with. CodeScience is an organization of humans, and remembers that every day. We all give a shit; that’s why I’m here.