We don't develop our people

Introduction

I have never thought of myself as doing human resource development, and it would be no good to leave anyone joining us in future with inflated expectations — hence this article.

First off, what does "human resource development" actually refer to? I asked ChatGPT, and got this:

1. Education and training: new-hire orientation, skills training, management training, leadership training and so on.
2. Career development support: setting career goals, advice on direction, offering career paths and so on.
3. Broadening practical experience: job rotation (building experience in different departments and roles), assignment to new projects and so on.
4. Mentorship and coaching: experienced managers and seniors taking on the role of supporting the growth of juniors and reports.
5. Providing feedback: making an individual's strengths and the points they could improve clear, through regular performance reviews, 360-degree feedback and the like.

Fair enough — that sounds about right.

What "development" actually looks like at Quartile

I had half expected the answer to be one that did not apply to Quartile at all, but looking at the individual points, some of them fit better than I would have thought.

We barely do point 1 at all. On point 2, being a very small company makes it hard to hold out any yardstick in the form of internal positions, so goal-setting ends up more like "let's become the best Odoo consultant in Japan!"

Point 3 may in a sense be happening of its own accord. Several projects are always running, and there is no shortage of new and challenging problems. Everyone, me included, works through tasks while stretching a little beyond their reach. Anything like job rotation is difficult, though.

On points 4 and 5 our formal appraisal machinery is immature, but in practice a considerable amount of discussion and feedback passes back and forth daily. Delivering our service the agile way has much to do with this. Because we take on Odoo implementation projects on a time-and-materials basis as a rule, we keep detailed timesheets and share them with the customer. As a step before that we classify whether each block of time is billable and check daily that the classification holds up — and that is where each person's own assessment gets reconciled with the assessment of the person responsible, which is me.

To put it roughly and charitably: we put no effort into building machinery aimed at human resource development, but the conditions, the style and the culture here do push growth hard in practice. I want everyone at Quartile to grow fast, earn well and be happy, and I am not sparing with advice or with opportunities to that end.

I think the "development" methods in point 1 in particular would have almost no effect at a company like Quartile — tiny, and built around solving problems. That is because they are so heavily a matter of the company "giving" one-way, which leaves people passive. Such methods may raise the standard of work a little at a large company, but their effect thins out in an organisation that does not treat division of labour and standardised work as automatically good, and whose measures lean towards solving problems.

The conditions under which people grow

The aim of "development" is supposed to be people's "growth", but I think the causal link between the two has grown pretty weak in our times — depending on the line of business, naturally. In that sense the phrase "human resource development" must be sounding anachronistic more and more often.

So how do people grow? To my mind, certainly not by being "given" things. The starting point is arriving at some realisation of your own and wanting badly to grow. Someone with a strong desire to grow will act and grow on their own if left alone; with someone who lacks it, nothing changes however much the company works on them.

What Quartile should be doing is not uniform training but offering conditions in which motivated people find it easy to grow. Some examples, in no particular order:

• a style of thinking through how anything ought to be, then producing a realistic answer
• sharing deep know-how about Odoo and business systems
• failure is fine so long as you thought it through and acted (a stance, no more — there are situations where failure is not acceptable, and we watch for those)
• no excessive workload (as a rule, no overtime)
• anything that helps growth or productivity, ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot among them, brought in readily at the company's expense
• more contact with the outside (we encourage OSS community activity, study groups elsewhere and the like)
• support for English conversation lessons

Those are the sorts of things.

In summary

People who have left have judged that "Quartile doesn't develop its people" and that "they're bad at development". All I could say to that was, well, yes — which left me faintly unsettled. But I think the real difference was in where each of us placed "development" to begin with.

We are a tiny, problem-solving company; our survival strategy follows from that, and so does our view of "development". Someone arriving from a place unlike that will often, naturally enough, feel differently about it. Where that difference cannot be resolved while working together, the way work and the culture go here will not, unfortunately, be comfortable.

For someone who acts in order to grow, on the other hand, I think what we offer is reasonably good. With producing value in the open in mind, and with access to the resources you need, you assemble your own course of action, carry it out, take the feedback and correct course. Keep repeating that and you grow whether you like it or not. We try to deliver each of those elements at a high level.

I wrote this hoping to head off any large mismatch in expectations about "development". So: we do not develop people at Quartile. Make use of what Quartile offers and grow enormously!

We are hiring

Our open-source-based services have been well received, and customers are bringing us plenty of work.

At Quartile we pursue producing real value in the open. If reading this has left you — a software engineer or an ERP consultant — wanting to go deeper with Odoo, please do apply! (Remote is fine.)

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash