
it was a great place to work at until the split sides and hired a new project manager and they treated the water side like crap it started stressing me out alot so I had to leave and find a better work environment wich I did

Jobcase has a very interesting origin story. We initially reorganized from a machine-learning based hedge fund into an online media company. I suppose we used to be what John Doerr would categorize as a mercenary culture. But that is not at all the case now! Nothing could be further from the truth.
When the clarity of our mission came into focus (around 2013-2014), we embraced a missionary culture and vision – so much so that we reorganized the entire company around this vision both in terms of legal corporate structure, internal organization, revenue – everything!
And this refocus on a purpose-driven company, on a missionary culture, has made all the difference. Not only in our success as a company but in our satisfaction with our own worklife. Life is too short, and the age we live in is too ripe with grand opportunities, to simply focus on profit. One can build great companies who do great things – and that is what drives Jobcase. We are building great shareholder value – but we are doing so by helping millions of people - what could be better than that?
Our mission is to empower America’s workforce (soon to be global workforce). We believe we are in the greatest transition of managing one’s worklife since the initial industrial revolution over 100 years ago. Everyone today must be their own free agent to self advocate for jobs, for promotions, to figure out careerpathing and lifepathing, to figure out education and training needs, to advocate for proper pay and benefits – but how? Where does one go for support, for advice, for knowledge in an era in which the average 25 year old has already had 7 jobs (DOL) and where your manager is unlikely to be thinking of their own 10-year horizon, let alone yours? Answer: Jobcase. A free, open-access platform that empowers people to help each other succeed in their worklives, and provides tools and resources underneath to really help!
One paradox of this mission is that to build a platform that empowers people of every education level and skillset - it takes employees with some of the most advanced skillsets (data science, data analytics, software engineering). This part of the labor pool is unbelievably competitive to hire. One thing that materialized after we transitioned to a mission driven culture is that suddenly recruitment became easy, & attrition isn’t even a concern. People with these advanced skills almost always have job offers. And, these job offers always pay very, very well. A company can’t win the software engineering and data scientist talent wars by remuneration bumps alone. People with those skills are aware that they can be part of something more meaningful than just dollars. Some choose curing diseases. Some choose self-driving cars or augmented reality. Jobcase employees choose helping our fellow man. Imagine the satisfaction of knowing that you are building a platform for millions of people to leverage for their own success. Imagine being able to help people who may not have been lucky enough to have the benefits of education, mentorship, and support structures that you yourself benefitted from. It’s a great feeling to work at Jobcase. Now imagine you get a call from a transactional job-board, or ad-tech company asking you to leave Jobcase because they want to pay you $5k more for your labor because it can increase their profit by 5%. Of course our employees scoff at those approaches - because money isn't everything!. At Jobcase, you can generate wealth for your family, but you do so by making the world a bit better place – every – single – day. I can’t imagine trying to compete for top tech talent without our mission. It is not the reason we made the transition all those years ago - we did so because it was the right thing to do. But that decision's impact on our own talent recruitment is certainly a huge benefit and huge driver of our success!
But this purpose-driven approach is like that old saw that says ‘you can’t be a little bit pregnant’. You can’t be a little bit mission-driven. It has to be sincere and authentic and it has to impact every aspect of your company, or you are simply fooling yourself.
Jobcase’s northstar of “empowering people” impacts every conversation in every room of the office day and night. Even things as detailed or innocuous as ‘threading of conversations’ have programmers and product managers spending hours talking PEOPLE -not technology- in their planning sessions. Here’s how this 1 example played out:
When the team was putting together rules for how our conversation threads would work in the community section, the rules were dictated by hours of debate over how to best empower people. You see, as a social platform, people can connect openly with people, so only the Company-reviews are anonymous by default. So the engineers became concerned that we would not be empowering someone in the specific case where a person puts a comment out to the broad community only to regret it at some later date. And it doesn’t matter how much later. Imagine someone saying something unflattering about a competitive company, but later interviewing there. So the problem discussed became - how can people be open in the community but also empowered on a go-forward basis? Well the logical answer is to let them delete anything they’ve previously posted. But wait. This is great for that person but what about everyone else? What if they said something they regretted but 2 other people commented on it. If the root conversation is deleted, then the other ones lose their context. So in that example, we would empower the first person but do the opposite to the next 2 Jobcasers. Solution? We allow any comment that has not been ‘touched’ by another Jobcaser to be deleted by the author at any time, UNLESS the comment has been ‘touched’ by someone else – in which case we created an ‘anonymize this’ button so that it is no longer attributed to them. This way, they don’t have to worry about the comment being attributed anymore, but others still have their context. This was extra work (and therefore money spent) from the company, but it is the right thing to do for our members. And these kinds of conversations about preserving and improving peoples power happen everywhere – not just in the management suite, not just in sales and business development offices, not just in product meetings, but also in code meetings, in QA meetings, in EVERYTHING. A culture of empowering members MUST be pervasive or don’t even bother. And EVERY employee must be empowered with a veto button if they ever think a member’s rights are taking a back seat to any other decision.
We strive to walk the walk. And staying true to a purpose driven company vision is making recruitment and retention of employees, and growth of the fastest growing new social media site in the country – Jobcase.com – possible. It’s not easy – and you must often sacrifice short-term profitability for long-term enterprise value growth – but I highly highly recommend missionary over mercenary cultures to all aspiring entrepreneurs.
#entrepreneur #mission #culture #integrity #recruitment #retention #smb #management