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My Model for a Better Work Culture

Most companies operate on outdated, inefficient, and unfair systems for compensation, career growth, and decision-making.
Promotions are slow. Compensation is opaque. Internal politics decides who gets credit. I've never seen a proper idea ecosystem utilized in a company (crowdsourcing and refining ideas. Tons of additional benefits beyond just lets ideas grow organically)

When I'm in charge, this changes.

Core Principles:​

Equal Pay for Equal Skill​

  • Compensation is based purely on capability and impact, not location or tenure.
  • No geographic pay adjustments—a senior engineer in Europe gets paid the same as one in NYC.
  • No arbitrary seniority gates—if you perform at a higher level, you get paid at that level immediately.

Flexible Pay vs. Equity Mix​

  • Employees can choose their compensation structure—some may want more base salary, others more equity.
  • Allows for life-stage flexibility—someone in wealth-building mode might want more cash, while someone betting long-term on the company might take more equity.

Work-Life Flexibility​

  • Part-time options for temporary lifestyle changes (e.g., "I want to go surf in Portugal for 2 months" → take lower pay but keep your role).
  • No forced in-office mandates—but if the company requires travel, it covers costs.
  • Hybrid work is structured for impact, not control—if someone wants to be 75% in a city hub or 100% remote, they should have the choice.

Clear, Skill-Based Leveling​

  • No politics, tenure-based promotions, or manager bottlenecks.
  • Transparent, justified skill levels—if you operate at a principal level, you get paid as a principal, period.
  • No artificial barriers—if someone performs at a higher level, they get moved up instantly, rather than waiting for annual promotion cycles.

Radical Transparency in Compensation & Budgeting​

  • Everyone knows what everyone makes. No hidden salary bands, no secrecy.
  • You have the right to question discrepancies—if a colleague in the same role makes significantly more, the company must justify why.
  • Budgets are team-driven, not top-down.
    • If you’re a team lead and you have a $1M budget, it’s completely up to you whether to hire 3 people or 10.
    • Everyone in the company will be able to see how budgets are allocated.

Free Market Teams & Cutthroat Accountability (With Safety Nets for New Hires)​

  • Teams must justify their value to the company.
    • If budget cuts happen, teams that can’t justify their impact are disbanded, and members find new teams.
    • No one is immediately fired—there is an internal transition period where every member (including team leads) can find their best-fit role.

Derisking for New Hires​

  • Just because a team fails doesn't mean individuals fail.
    • New hires who started on a struggling team are encouraged to switch teams proactively before disbandment happens.
    • Participation in company-wide project ideation (via the internal app) is highly encouraged—this is a core part of company culture, not an afterthought.
    • Being involved in the broader idea ecosystem creates visibility, ensuring that skilled individuals have plenty of landing spots.

The "Seats on the Bus" Concept​

  • When a team is disbanded, the company treats it as a reshuffling, not a firing event.
  • An internal review period follows, where impacted employees explore available team openings and find the best fit.
  • Team leads are included in this process—if they were great leaders, they should have no issue finding a new team or even starting a new initiative through the project ideation system.

Minimal Hierarchy for Team Oversight​

Someone needs to decide when teams should be disbanded—but hierarchy should be minimal and transparent.

How It Works:​

  • At small to mid-scale, there is just one level of hierarchy:
    • A senior exec group is responsible for reviewing every team and making pruning decisions when necessary.
  • At larger scales (when needed), this extends to a second level:
    • An Exec-to-Team Overseer model, where each overseer is responsible for N groups of teams.
    • These overseers work directly with senior execs to ensure alignment.

Process for Team Reviews & Disbandment​

  • A simple spreadsheet is maintained, listing:
    • Each team, its goals, recent output, and current budget.
    • A short summary of how leadership views the team’s strategic fit.
  • Once a month or qtr (interval tbd), a quick review meeting (a few hours max) is held to reassess:
    • Do all current teams still make sense?
    • Are budgets aligned with impact?
    • Do any teams need to be restructured, disbanded, or merged?
  • All senior exec perspectives from these meetings are publicly posted to the internal app.
    • No secret decision-making—everyone in the company can see the rationale behind each adjustment.

What This Prevents:​

✅ No bloated multi-layered hierarchy—decisions stay fast and efficient.
✅ No hidden politics or private budget decisions—everything is transparently posted.
✅ No arbitrary firings—team members always get a chance to find a new spot internally first.

This structure ensures that high performers always have opportunities, teams operate efficiently, and everyone has full visibility into leadership decisions.

Evolutionary Pressure on Ideas: Only the Best Survive, but Failure is NOT Punished​

  • Ideas that gain enough traction get budget—but if execution fails, the question is why.
    • Was the idea flawed, or was execution the problem?
    • Failure is a learning process, not a blame process.
  • The best ideas will naturally survive. It does not matter who came up with the idea—ideas stand or fall on their own merit.
  • It never reflects badly on you if your ideas don’t get traction.
    • If you propose 100 ideas and they all get downvoted into oblivion, that’s not a failure—it just means you need better framing, better articulation, or better alignment with company goals.
    • Your manager or mentor is responsible for helping you improve how you communicate your ideas, so they have a better chance of being received.

Constructive Feedback is Mandatory: No Lazy Negativity​

  • Negative responses without reasoning are automatically flagged.
    • If you comment, “This is ridiculous.” or “This will never work.” without an explanation, you will get a notification that you must provide reasoning.
    • If you continuously refuse to provide constructive feedback, you will be fired.
    • An LLM assistant can help you draft a proper response if you struggle to articulate why something doesn’t work.

🔥 Tearing others down is the single worst thing you can do at this company. 🔥

  • Taking calculated bets on ideas that fail? That’s fine.
  • Providing vague, dismissive, or negative feedback with no explanation? That’s not fine.
  • ANY response that does not contribute to refining ideas, discussing benefits, or highlighting risks is highly discouraged.
  • This system is built to refine and improve ideas, not to stroke egos or protect status.

Visibility & Weighting: Seniority Matters, But Merit is Key​

  • Not all upvotes/downvotes are equal.
    • A Principal Engineer’s upvote carries more weight than a Junior Engineer’s, but both are visible.
    • Idea ranking will show who upvoted/downvoted so that decisions are informed by expertise, not just popularity.
  • On the app, you can see:
    • ✅ 2 principal-level engineers upvoted
    • ✅ 15 mid-level engineers upvoted
    • ✅ 5 junior engineers upvoted
    • ⛔ 1 senior engineer downvoted (and their reasoning is public)

This ensures that:
✅ High-quality expertise is visible and weighted appropriately.
✅ Juniors still have a voice, but experienced engineers help guide direction.
✅ Decisions are transparent—anyone can see why an idea gained traction or failed.

🚀 Why This Works​

✅ The best ideas win—regardless of who came up with them.
✅ Failure is treated as part of the process, not a personal flaw.
✅ People are actively trained to improve their ability to present ideas.
✅ Toxic negativity is eliminated—only constructive feedback is allowed.
✅ Decision-making is transparent—everyone sees why an idea moves forward or gets scrapped.

This system ensures that innovation thrives, egos don’t get in the way, and bad ideas naturally filter out—without discouraging people from thinking big.

🔄 Team Switching is Simple: No Silos, No Barriers​

  • We actively prevent silos.
    • Teams do not operate as isolated islands—everything is public, everything is visible.
    • The public idea system ensures that everyone knows who is working on what at all times.
    • If you’re interested in another project, you know exactly who to talk to.

🎯 Team Leads Must Earn Their Teams, Not Control Them​

  • It is the team lead's responsibility to retain their team members.
    • If team members start leaving, that’s a reflection on leadership, not the employees.
    • If people are constantly looking elsewhere, the lead should be asking why—not punishing movement.
    • Leadership is earned through vision & execution, not authority.

👥 Controlled Team Exits: You Can Be Kicked Out, But Not Fired Instantly​

  • Team leads do NOT have the power to fire employees directly.
    • However, they do have the ability to remove someone from their team.
  • If a team member is spending all their time searching for another team (instead of contributing to the team's mission),
    • The team lead can officially remove them from the team.
    • This isn’t an instant firing—the employee is given N months to find another role internally.
  • During this transition period, the employee has multiple options:
    • ✅ Convince another team lead that they bring value to a different project.
    • ✅ Start their own team through the public idea system and gain traction.
    • ✅ Use mentorship resources to explore a better role fit.

🔍 Why This Team System Works​

✅ Encourages organic movement between teams without fear.
✅ Prevents toxic "hoarding" of talent by bad leaders.
✅ Forces team leads to be real leaders, not just title-holders.
✅ Allows employees to explore without the risk of instant termination.
✅ Keeps the company dynamic, constantly evolving, and high-performing.

🌟 Protecting Proven High-Value Contributors​

  • Not everyone needs to be a leader.
    • Some employees excel at delivering impact across multiple projects without ever leading a team—and that’s completely fine.
    • If someone has a history of high-value contributions, but has just never happened to lead, they are still a critical asset to the company.
    • This model does not punish people for choosing not to lead.

🛡️ Special Consideration for Proven Contributors in Bad Situations​

  • If a highly valuable employee ends up on a struggling team and desperately wants to leave:
    • Their past contributions are taken into account.
    • Senior execs (or the minimal middle layer) will step in to find a solution.

🔹 Potential solutions:

  • ✅ Direct placement into another team that aligns with their skills. (With team lead approval -- remember that team leads have full autonomy)
  • ✅ A tailored transition plan where they help another team in a flexible role.
  • ✅ Taking a sabbatical to recover from burnout before re-entering the company.

⏳ The "Months Not on a Team" Rule Can Be Overridden​

  • We want to keep those who are genuinely trying to add value.
    • If someone has clearly demonstrated long-term impact, but is struggling to find a team, executives can override the "must find a new team in X months" rule.
    • No one who is actively contributing and aligning with company goals gets left behind.
    • This is not a free pass for underperformers, but a safety net for proven contributors.

🔍 Why This Works​

✅ Encourages fluid movement without forcing leadership roles.
✅ Recognizes high-impact individuals, even if they never formally lead.
✅ Prevents talent loss due to bad team placements.
✅ Allows flexibility for those experiencing burnout or transition periods.

Merging And Voluntary Disbanding of Teams (Initiated by Team Leads)​

🔄 Team Leads Can Proactively Suggest Merging or Disbanding Teams​

  • Team leads have full autonomy—not just over hiring/firing, but also over the structure of their team.
  • They can actively suggest merging with another team or even disbanding their own.

🤝 Merging Teams: Encouraged, But Only When It Makes Sense​

  • Merging teams is a mutual decision between leads—it cannot be forced.
  • If a team lead sees an opportunity for alignment and efficiency, they should:
    • ✅ Talk with another lead informally first—maybe over lunch or coffee.
    • ✅ Encourage team members to get to know the other team (both in real life and in the internal app).
    • ✅ Ensure there is strong strategic alignment before initiating a merge.
  • Merging is encouraged when:
    • Teams are duplicating efforts and working on highly similar initiatives.
    • Better efficiency or knowledge-sharing would come from combining forces.
    • A merged team would create a stronger, more effective unit.
  • Merging is NOT encouraged when:
    • There are fundamental strategic disagreements on how the initiative should be executed.
    • The teams are too structurally different to integrate smoothly.
    • A merge would result in excess overhead or complexity.

📌 Ideally, the internal idea app should prevent duplicate efforts before funding even happens—so most merges should be rare.

🚫 Disbanding a Team: Accepting When an Initiative No Longer Makes Sense​

  • Disbanding a team is NOT failure—it’s part of the company’s evolutionary process.
  • Team leads can decide to disband their own teams if they realize an initiative is no longer viable.

🔍 When to Disband a Team:

  • The original assumptions behind the project turned out to be wrong.
  • The initiative is not delivering enough value compared to alternatives.
  • Market conditions or company strategy have changed, making the initiative obsolete.

🔹 Questions to Ask Before Disbanding:

  1. What has changed?
  2. What did we miss when we decided to fund this initiative?
  3. Can we simply abandon the initiative, keep our funding, and focus on team placement & refining company-wide ideas?

🔥 Key Principle: It is OK to say, "This didn’t work. Let’s move on." 🔥

🔍 What Happens After a Team is Disbanded?​

  • Funding from the disbanded team does NOT automatically disappear.
    • If the initiative is scrapped, the team can retain its funding temporarily while members focus on finding new placements or contributing to idea refinement.
  • Team members go through the internal transition process to:
    • ✅ Join another existing team.
    • ✅ Refine or propose new initiatives through the company-wide idea system.
    • ✅ Take a temporary research or advisory role while evaluating options.
  • The company encourages a smooth transition, never forces rushed decisions.

🔍 Why This Team Merging and Disbanding Strategy Works​

✅ Prevents redundant work—no 5 teams building the same thing.
✅ Encourages continuous evolution—if something isn’t working, teams pivot instead of dragging things out.
✅ Gives team leads real decision-making power—without forcing top-down restructuring.
✅ Makes sure failed initiatives are treated as learning experiences, not punishable offenses.

Inatiative Pausing and Resumption

📄 Documentation is Encouraged (Markdown, of Course)​

  • Every initiative should be well-documented in Markdown, ensuring:
    • ✅ Clarity of thought—decisions, assumptions, and objectives are clearly recorded.
    • ✅ Continuity—if an initiative is paused or a team is disbanded, future teams can pick up where it left off.
    • ✅ Accessibility—anyone in the company can understand past work and strategic decisions.

⏸ Initiatives Can Be Paused, Not Just Canceled​

  • Sometimes a project is no longer a priority—but that doesn’t mean it failed.
  • If company strategy shifts, an initiative can simply be paused.
    • The team is disbanded and members are moved to higher-impact areas (where they also want to be).
    • The project documentation remains so that it can be resumed later if needed.

🔹 Why This Matters:

  • 🚫 No wasted effort—just because something isn’t a priority now doesn’t mean it won’t be valuable later.
  • 🚫 No attachment to sunk costs—the focus is on real-time strategic alignment.
  • ✅ Work doesn’t vanish—future teams can restart initiatives from where they left off instead of reinventing the wheel.

📢 Strategic Awareness: No One Should Be Caught Off Guard​

  • Execs & the minimal middle layer should ensure team leads are always aware of company strategy changes.
  • No sudden surprises—team leads should have a pulse on:
    • 🔄 Shifts in company goals.
    • 🏗️ New emerging priorities.
    • 🛠️ Where leadership is focusing resources.

💡 If strategy changes, teams should have time to adjust—not be blindsided.

🔍 Why This Works​

✅ Encourages thorough documentation, preventing knowledge loss.
✅ Allows strategic flexibility—initiatives aren’t “failures,” they’re just paused when needed.
✅ Prevents abrupt team disbandments without warning.
✅ Ensures company-wide alignment without micromanagement.

Why This Entire Model Works

✅ Truly Transparent → No hidden comp bands, budget mysteries, or artificial career gatekeeping.
✅ Survival of the Best Ideas → Teams that can’t justify their existence die off naturally, no more pointless bureaucracy.
✅ Leaders Must Earn Their Position → If you can’t inspire people to work with you, you don’t deserve to lead.
✅ A Free Market Inside the Company → People gravitate toward the work that excites them, not what they are assigned to do.

This model makes it so that only high-impact teams survive, while also ensuring that anyone can rise to leadership if they have the vision and execution ability.

This isn't just about fairness—it’s about building an open, high-performance, high-trust system.