One of my favorite things to do in the world is travel. I don’t think I’m alone here. When we sold GameSpy I went on an absolute 5 year bender of travel. Asia, Europe, Australia, South America… I couldn’t get enough. Surfing. Hiking. Touristing. (Is that a word? Should be) I always tied to work but let’s face it, the tools for remote working back then were less than amazing. It took a lot of magic and people on the ground back home to make anything really happen.
Lately, a lot of change has been in the air about how to work and where to work. I have always been fan of big, fun offices. I think work should be fun. Really fun. At GameSpy we had so much fun there is no question more than a few employment and workplace laws were violated. Certainly our HR department turned a blind eye on many an occasion. More on that another time. We had big offices, a video arcade, Stone Cold Steve Austin would challenge you to arm wrestle in the lobby. Good stuff.
Tradition carries on and as much fun as we have at R+R, we do get serious here. Right now, we are thinking a lot about quality of work and quality of life, which is why we are focused heavily on Remote Work. We recently made the switch to remote work allowing everyone to work from home or wherever they like, really.
There are no longer many valid reasons to care about where people are. Everyone talks about hiring the best but that doesn’t necessarily ring true if you are limited to the local area population. Some areas are certainly more privileged than others due to population density. But commutes suck time away from life and work and… why?
So it comes down to this:
We don’t care where you work or when you work as long as you get the work done.
This sounds “real real nice” of course, but it’s a little more difficult to make happen in the real world. R+R spans 4 continents now as I write this. We just hired a lead engineer in… Australia of all places. There is a lot of trust that has to be built in to the relationship to make this work. And you (and me) have to be committed to building interesting things. It can be messy!
R+R has 4 projects either in release or development, so we are busy. You may have heard of them or more likely not - we keep a low profile and we minimize the noise and distraction. Or maybe everyone just hates them and we don’t know it yet. Anything is possible!
Most top of mind is that we are building a brand new class of application designed to empower groups of people…. that aren’t used to being empowered… to be great together. To become closer and coordinated. How does the quote go….. “Angels are vastly outnumbered in this world, but they can beat the Devils if they can just become more organized.” As I re-read this I realize that I am just not doing it justice but hey, I’ll work on it.
We have our initial customers and they are ecstatic.
More on this to come.
Mark Surfas
