Where you choose to work affects your daily life more than almost any other choice you make in life. Therefore, you should do whatever you can to find a workplace that suits you, your interests and your goals for the future.
Many workplaces are OK fits for most people. Braver isn't like that. We're definitely not suitable for everyone, but for some types of people we can be a perfect match.
Here are a few things that make Braver a slightly different workplace than most others. Read through these and you will quickly understand whether this might be a good place to work for you or not.
We have no outside investors or other third parties who have any say in how we run our company.
That means we decide for ourselves how we want to work, which projects we want to undertake, who we want to hire, and how we want to develop Braver into whatever we want it to be.
That means you don't have to ask permission to try out an idea, or to spend a few thousand dollars on an experiment, or work remotely from Cape Town for a week, for that matter. But it also means we must hire only responsible people who prove themselves worthy of the trust. If you need rigid rules and crystal clear instructions to thrive in a job, this is probably not the place for you — but if you believe in freedom under responsibility, and the ability to think for your self and be proactive, you'll fit right in with us.
This means that we are not content with just doing things that are standard practice today, but also try to understand what awaits around the next corner, and what it will mean for the world, for our customers and for ourselves. AI is a good example, low code tools is another, and remote work is a third.
We make a living by creating forward-looking services, products and business models - that's why we need to do what we can to try to understand where the world is moving.
There's a lot we don't know yet. There are things that don't go as planned. We don't always live up to our own ideals. But at least we try to be honest about these things, both to ourselves and to our customers.
If a client project goes sideways, we talk about it early and play with open cards. When we don't live up to our employees' expectations, it can be addressed rather than swept under the rug. When we screw up, we see an opportunity to talk about it and learn from it, rather than keep quiet and hope no one notices.
We believe in “long term games with long term people”, and we want to make decisions that benefit our employees, our customers, and our community in the 10+ year term, rather than taking shortcuts that might pay off in the next quarter.
This may be difficult in a world with increasingly shorter time horizons, but we think it will pay off in the long term. Those who live will see..