It is quite clear to everyone now that remote working is not a temporary thing: first, the pandemic itself isn’t going away in a few days; and, second, I don’t believe anyone in our industry will go back to the office 5 days a week when it’s over, so working remote - even just part of the week - is here to stay.

As part of our recruitment process, we currently offer candidates the option of a take-home code exercise and/or doing a pairing session. Even though the code exercise requires a longer time commitment, some candidates choose it because of the flexibility to work offline, timezone challenges or simply to show us their coding skills.

So here is an “open letter to candidates" about what we're looking for when we review their code..

One of Pragmateam's core objectives is that "learning and experimentation is recognised as an integral part of our culture".. We found that people were regularly bringing this objective to life, whether it be experimenting with new techniques, organising a learning lunch, presenting at meetups, all with a positive impact on the rest of the team. But we were lacking a way to naturally yet formally thank, reward and recognise each other.

We believe it is far more pragmatic to spend time on understanding the real problem and solving for that rather than allowing our bias towards action to take over and risk having to start from scratch - or delivering a bad product

What are your company values? How does your behaviour relate to them on a daily basis? How do you continue to evolve the company values as the company evolves? How do you onboard new team mates into an existing culture and set of values?

Every two months we come together again as a team for our PragmaOffsite. Given our recent growth, now 26 Pragmatists, across 4 clients and 2 cities, the challenge we set ourselves to address at the offsite was:

How do we maintain our culture and close connection to each other while we continue to grow, irrespective of where our team mates are located or which client they are partnering with?

September 10th was Pragmateam’s 3rd Birthday, and as tradition has it, we gathered in Centennial Park with our families to celebrate.

This day marked 3 years since we registered our business name, 3 years since we stepped out of the corporate world and started our own micro world, a world based on the foundations of our values: Pragmatic | Delivery | Outcomes | Empathy | Behaviours.

The “team” in Pragmateam is critical to us and our culture. We are a collective of like-minded practitioners who are all inquisitive, continually looking to experiment and learn. And we acknowledge that working together as a team will get better results for us personally, our clients and their customers.

Last week we experimented with the offsite format, hosting a mini conference. Each Pragmatist invited a PragmaFriend, whether it be someone they are working with at a client or someone they felt close aligned to our values and passions.

This week we held our bi-montly offsite, providing a great opportunity for us to regroup, reflect, reward and focus. The format for our offsite varies, such as hackdays, reflecting and planning, refresh OKRs and guest speakers.

Every 8 weeks we spend quality time with the whole team, typically a half day offsite. Each offsite we seek to experiment in some way, shape or form. Here we share some of these experiments and what we learned from them.

It is inevitable that we make mistakes in a new environment. But if we allowed ourselves, and if others allowed us, to make mistakes on a small scale in rapid succession, then we can avoid failing big.