Working Life

Why overpaying your developers is the cheapest thing to do

February 13, 2013 By Will L. 1 Comment

One of the crew posted up an article citing the Mythical Man Month today. This concept first came to me through an old co-founder who was a smart PhD type, he'd just read the book in the 1990s and I based all of my startup recruitment around this idea - it worked fab. Pay people who are brilliant "way too much" because it's the cheapest thing to do... I use a rough square law to extrapolate something more useful... simple project → 1 year, 1 coder complex project → 2 years, 1 coder → 1 year, 4 coders Or pu another way, if you can get a good engineer who is 2x as productive, … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Engineering, Programming, Working Life Tagged With: bucky box, developers, management, pay, projects, salary, startups, teams

Exciting beginnings

July 31, 2012 By Anthony Leave a Comment

New beginnings are always exciting times. I’ve been behind a desk at Enspiral Wellington barely a month and with the boundless enthusiasm colliding and overflowing in every direction the amount of ideas being generated here is almost crippling.But ideas are cheap - the core value of this network is the way it enables action.On my first day Chalklewas an idea for an open platform for people who have a skill or passion, to teach it to people interested in learning it. A way for local communities to rethink education and lower the barriers for anyone to learn almost anything.Chalkle was born as … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Companies, Working Life, Work_Life Tagged With: Chalkle, new business, startups

Reflection on my internship at Enspiral

December 12, 2011 By Nicolas Leave a Comment

As part of my studies in computer science, I had the chance to take part in three professional experiences in the past three years. Each experience really helped develop my skills further, as well as gaining self-confidence and finding my technical interests in the IT world. Even then, I was missing something, without which, I felt absolutely uncertain about my future: that was a Purpose. I like making websites mainly for their ability to reach out many people and to give birth to strong communities with comparatively little effort. I see the Web a bit like a big jam session where everybody … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Reflections, Staff Stories, Working Life, Work_Life

Double Lives of Enspiralites

October 20, 2011 By sam Leave a Comment

Some of us here at Enspiral have double lives. Some people are working on startups, some people spend time volunteering, some just love to surf. Me? Well I also work with a national organisation which focuses on connecting people to their environment - mainly through volunteering. I love this other job, and it really complements my work on Bucky Box (helping to build tools for a better food system). At the end of last week, I found myself suddenly called on, in this other capacity, in much more urgency than normal. For those of you in New Zealand, you will undoubtedly be familiar … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Opinion, Remote Work, Staff Stories, Working Life, Work_Life

Future Working

October 5, 2011 By sam 1 Comment

Our very own Sam Rye was featured in Unlimited Magazine's latest edition with a story about Future Working. Worth a read! Check out Unlimited Magazine online, or at their Facebook page. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Remote Work, Staff Stories, Working Life Tagged With: future work, magazine, new zealand, press, Unlimited Magazine

In the pursuit of purpose

August 16, 2011 By sam 2 Comments

Sam working as a conservation team leader in NZ

A few weeks back I wrote a blog which was picked up by Nature Coast, about lifestyle working and it’s possibilities for something greater. It posed the quandry “if we’ve got more flexibility & choice over our working lives, what’s our new found motivation directed toward?”. I have been exploring this with my own life for the last 4 years. I sometimes call myself a ‘corporate refugee’, but really my time was only slight compared to many who’ve escaped the realm later in life. I left the UK with the assertion that I was ‘off to work on something which I … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Big Ideas, Opinion, Reflections, Remote Work, Staff Stories, Working Life

New working paradigm = new possibilities

April 28, 2011 By sam 6 Comments

This is the extended post of a my guest article published in Nature Coast's newsletter in April. The term 'lifestyle working' has been bandied around a fair bit over the last few years, but has made fairly minimal impacts on the day-to-day environment in which we work, in general. Sure, perhaps we're able to leave the office with an iPhone and connect with calls and emails on the move, allowing greater freedom, but generally we still go about business in a similar way. Having done a fair bit of personal research in this area, I'm now finding a radical shift in this model is … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Opinion, Remote Work, Working Life, Work_Life Tagged With: Lifestyle, Motivation, Nature Coast, Opportunity, Purpose

Balancing Life & Family – the results

January 1, 2011 By sam Leave a Comment

In our original blog Balancing Life & Family, we spoke about how work-life balance may be maintained, or even shaped to your particular circumstances. We got some great feedback from our survey, and this is our chance to share it with you. Most of our respondents had young children, and felt their current employers had a fair bit of room for improvement, several had even gone freelance in response to business’ unreasonable demands on their lives. If they hadn’t already, most people said that they would like to work part-time with flexible hours (dependent on family … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Opinion, Remote Work, Working Life, Work_Life Tagged With: analysis, balance, family, remote-working, research, survey, work-life, Work_Life