Yetto values: Joy Matters

I think about death kind of a lot, and I have for most of my life.

I realize that might seem like a weird way to start a blog post about joy — or any post about company values for that matter — but it’s true, and I think it’s relevant. 21% of your total waking hours over a 76 year lifespan will be spent working, with another 33% sleeping. In total, that translates to you spending over half of your life either unconscious or laboring.

Actually, this number also only accounts for time actually spent at work, and that 21% is measured across the whole life, which means your childhood — whether carefree or traumatic — doesn’t count. This also means that every hour of commuting, every moment of stress you have before and after going into work, every period of alone time you need because you’re too exhausted from the day, every minute you spend checking your notifications from bed; adds to that total number of hours you spend between birth and death toiling to survive.

It’s an astounding theft. No matter how much you love your job, how much you succeed, or how great your co-workers are; the fact is that — unless something fundamental changes about the ordering of our society — you’re going to be living your life around your work, and not the other way around.

How much more horrifying is it, then, that our tools, colleagues, and employers often aggravate rather than alleviate this reality?

You’re not gonna make the world a better place

Plenty of companies claim they want to take care of employees, customers, and the world writ large — the ham-fisted insistence that all these startups are going to “make the world a better place” is a recurring jab at these claims from Silicon Valley under a decade ago — but in practice, when rubber meets the road, that amounts to little more than lip service.

We’re not special, we aren’t claiming to fix the world or be immune to the pressures of capitalism. Having said that, we believe there are values and structures that can help you order your company in such a way that when compromise must exist, you can at least triage it to ensure consistency with what matters most to you. It’s good to be specific about what your values mean in practice — as mentioned above, we’ve all seen platitudes be nothing more than propaganda — but your concrete policies and decisions are a reflection of the company’s philosophical beliefs, whether those are explicit (e.g. “Don’t be Evil”) or implicit (i.e. “we exist to make money, everything else is secondary. Greed is good.”).

With that in mind, I present to you the central, animating philosophy of Yetto and its founders: Joy Matters.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do good

“Joy” meaning “that which isn’t necessary, but makes life better”; “Mattering” meaning “Joy itself is enough of a reason to do something, we don’t need another motive.” This two-word sentiment is our first-filter for everything everything from product decisions to company policy, and it’s remarkably effective.

From a product perspective, it means asking questions like “does it increase or decrease joy and psychological safety for a support professional to be able to easily compare their ticket output to their colleagues?” and then refusing to build dashboards that allow for that comparison when the answer is “No”, regardless of how many managers or leaders want it. It means obsessing over details like how many tabs or browser windows a support professional would need to have open to do their job effectively, and trying to reduce that to as close to “one” as possible.

At the company level, it means rejecting the culture of “speed at all costs” that is endemic to startups and choosing to build deliberately and resiliently. It means trying to figure out what the minimum amount of hours everyone at the company can work while still being able to do their jobs. 32 hours? 24 hours? Let’s find out. It means asking “Why do we pay people different amounts of money based on where they live?”

None of these decisions or ideas are world-changing, and they’re not trying to be. What they are trying to do is make working life a little more joyful for everyone we can. Joy matters, and increasing it is enough of a goal in and of itself.

Are you the fuel? Or the operator?

All three of us have worked on building and supporting developer tooling for the last decade or more, but a better way of understanding this experience is that the problems we like solving involve improving people’s daily experience of work; as much as we can, in any way we can. We’ve been front-line support professionals, documentation engineers, technical writers, platform engineers, support leaders, ops specialists, and internal tooling developers. We will talk about how this experience informs building Yetto ad-nauseam, but the unifying focus we all share as a result is a deep, first-hand understanding that the current slate of tools for support professionals are not built to maximize their joy and productivity; they’re built to contain, measure, and control them.

We aim to change that, and we hope you join us in our attempt.