Building with Intention: The Way We Work at Empirical
The emergence of a high performing team is an alchemical thing. Special teams share common values which fosters a commitment to each other. That is the germ of what differentiates a great team from a group of people working in proximity. These values work well when left unstated, but writing them down helps to sharpen our understanding of how, and why, a team functions.
In the Empirical engineering organization, this is what we value:
We value accountability. Individually, we want to be accountable to each other. We want our colleagues to trust that we take pride in our work and we expect our colleagues to be honest with us about their work. Our shared accountability flows from the respect with which we treat each other and the respect we hold for each other’s abilities.
At Empirical, we work in a cooperative manner and understand that progress is made through compromise. An individual develops a feature for a short time, responsibility for maintenance and improvements falls on the whole team. Collective feedback influences the direction of work but developers have autonomy to make final decisions about their code.
We approach our work, and our careers, with an appetite for growth. Our hope is to end each day knowing more about our work, being better at our craft and understanding more about the problem we are solving than we did when we showed up in the morning. We have developed expertise in the tools we use to perform our jobs, but remain open to discovering ones. One of our most important meetings is our weekly demo because it lets us share the things we have learned in the course doing our jobs and a team is strengthened through collective knowledge.
We enjoy working with each other and we like the work we do. Everyone leads multifaceted lives of which Empirical is just one piece. We spend a lot of time thinking about and working on the prioritization of vulnerabilities and it would be a waste to not build more than software with that time together. Vulnerability prioritization is not required to be, nor is it expected to be, our purpose in life, but we care that everyone finds community at Empirical. And more than that, we want to be a community that everyone is glad to be a part of.
Our shared responsibility is to deliver value to our customers through the software we produce and the systems we operate. Our customers face intractable numbers of vulnerabilities. And those numbers are growing. We aim to tailor a custom path forward for each customer and do not expect to be blindly followed. Our customers use our data to protect themselves from attack and that requires them to place their trust in us. Our systems must produce outputs that are precise and accurate. They must tolerate inconsistent inputs, ingested from disparate sources. Results presented to our customers must be clear and actionable. Even more, we must be able to explain, and defend, any particular result. Providing no answer is preferable to providing the wrong answer.
Delivering consistent, accurate, trustworthy answers to our customers requires systems that are resilient, designed for change and built iteratively. We value simple code. While capable of summoning clever code, we wish to produce code that is no more clever than is necessary. We aim for loose coupling in the code we produce, and loosely couple ourselves to the code we write. We will build the wrong feature. We will build the right feature the wrong way. That is the nature of software development at a company of our size (and, we believe, of software development in general). We are ever willing to scrap code we used to love in order to move forward.
Most importantly, the team is ever in motion. The ways we worked, the processes we used and the software we wrote last month may not be sufficient next month. We embrace this need for change. Rather than treating these as regrettable missteps of the past, we relish the opportunity to conjure a slightly more perfect team out of what we’ve built thus far. These progressive transformations inch us continually closer to the place, the system, the team we need to be. And we believe the only way to get there is by working together openly and trusting in each other’s intentions and abilities.
If you are interested in helping to drive our team forward, please reach out.
Spring 2025, The Hoxton in Chicago, IL
