Culture at Buhata

How this started

I built and shipped the first version of Buhata myself. That happened because I lost a job, and getting back into the corporate world turned out to be much harder than it used to be. Plenty of people are living the same stretch right now. I’d rather say that plainly than pretend the company began with a grand plan.

What came out of it is a working product and a clear idea of what I want the next few people here to experience.

Where we’re honestly at

Early. Pre-launch. Growing on purpose rather than fast. Most of the people we work with are remote contractors, largely overseas, and that’s the shape until revenue makes something else responsible. We’ll say so in every job posting rather than let anyone find out on their start date.

What we actually hold to

• Say the real state of things. If a deadline’s going to slip, the useful moment to say so is when you first suspect it, not when it slips. Nobody here is punished for early bad news. Late bad news is the expensive kind.
• Write it down. A remote team spread across time zones runs on what’s written, not what was said in a call somebody missed. A short written decision beats a long meeting, and it survives the person who made it.
• Own a thing end to end. You’re not handed a slice of somebody else’s job. You get an area, the context that comes with it, and the authority to make calls inside it.
• Ask early rather than guess long. Two hours stuck is a question. Two days stuck is a management failure that started as a question nobody asked.
• Your hours are yours. Overlap where the work needs it, and otherwise work when you actually think well. We don’t measure activity, and there’s no tracker on your machine.
• Feedback is specific or it’s noise. Point at the work. Say what would make it better. Keep it in the open, where the rest of us learn from it too.

How I intend to manage

Clear scope, then get out of the way. You should always know what you own, what good looks like, and when it’s due, and after that the shape of your day is your business. I’d rather write a better brief than supervise a worse one.

Pay is discussed openly and in the currency you actually spend. Rate changes get reviewed on a schedule rather than when somebody works up the nerve to ask.

The honest part about working with a founder: I’ll sometimes have an opinion about your craft that’s worse than yours. Tell me. That’s why I hired somebody who does it for a living.

What we’re not

Not a family. It’s a company, and one of us signs the invoices. Not always-on: there’s no expectation of replies at midnight. Not a place with a promotion ladder yet, because the company is too small to draw one honestly. What you get instead is unusually direct access to the whole product and to the person building it.

Open roles are on the Careers page, and what we offer is set out in Benefits.