In this podcast Rob Steward shares why Progress Software is a great place to work, and he provides insights into corporate culture. This podcast lasts for 3:24.
Rob Steward:
play_blip_movie_3121678(); The culture of any company can really impact your satisfaction with what you do. Having been with the company for 16 years, I'm very happy with the way things are and with my workplace.
From a professional point of view, I've learned a lot of things from a lot of really smart people over my tenure. The environment is such that I can walk down the hall any day and at any time and there will be people talking about performance of JDBC drivers or ODBC drivers. Believe it or not, it’s true. They may be talking about the game last weekend, but there's always a group within the hall sharing ideas and talking about their personal lives and work. I've been to a lot of companies where you walk in and it's like a morgue, and if I were to describe the culture here I’d say it's very open, and that's why I use the hallway conversations as an example.
Probably a more concrete example of what kind of place it is to work and whether people enjoy what they do is over that 16 year period our turnover rate has always been low, single digits. So for example now -- and in this current economy everybody's turnover is a bit lower, but in the last three years, out of a 100 person R&D organization within Progress DataDirect I think we've had two people leave over that three year period. The turnover rate is incredible. Even back in the late '90s and early 2000s when sort of the software industry was booming and the normal turnover rate was 20%, ours was still in the 2, 3, 4% range.
My philosophy has always been software's about people. If you have good people you can build good software. Now, just because you have good people doesn't mean that you do build good software, but you won't build good software without good people. We respect people, we're very flexible. We hire very smart people. We've got guys who were spec lead of JDBC. We've got guys who designed the original TPC benchmarks. I mean, we've got a lot of very smart people who are very motivated and very much enjoy working here, and it makes my life and my work life so much better.