Hi, I'm thinking about apply for the May edition of founders and Coders, and work as freelance like your are saying could be very cool, but i'm from Spain and I was wondering if working remotely could be an option.

Whilst this is on a completely different scale, here are a few things worth looking out for as new people join the company:
https://blog.mailchimp.com/maintaining-company-culture-through-onboarding/

Opening this up as an issue for discussions related to this question:

"Q: What if a client wants me (as an individual) to do a piece of non-related work for them outside of F&C after I met them through an F&C freelance project?"

A: If working as a freelancer for F&C you promise not to undercut F&C. Therefore if a client wants you to do work, then you would charge them a rate that would not save them money by hiring you directly.

I am not sure that MVPs without proper quality control are a good idea any more.

There is an argument for upping the price and adding them as a dwyl service.

Couple of A few things:

• You say you'll take responsibility for finding perm work for those who don't want to freelance. Are you undertaking to guarantee either freelance work or perm work for every single FAC grad who wants it? (Not saying dream job, but a job?)
• You say you can only guarantee freelance work for the first four months. If someone goes through those four months and there's not enough freelance work to go round, will you continue to support them into perm employment?
• In the unlikely event that in a given cohort all 16 students want to freelance, will you guarantee four months of freelance income for all of them, or will you be selective?
• Will you guarantee to use your recruitment processes to at least look for work for older FAC alumni who are on second/third jobs? (i.e. are we still expecting alums to start their job searches through us?)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dynamic
https://github.com/nelsonic/ateam/blame/d678c2f150a2b7cb8efeb5316eddfd06ade9b336/README.md#L169
When I hear the expression "group dynamics" I always think consultant:

Sorry if I'm being dim, but are these FAQs that you've been asked and you intend to answer in the next draft of this? Cos I'd very much like to know the answers to all of them.

(And sorry I'm late to raise issues, but pre 9am on Saturday is technically still Friday)

I've already asked you this but for others who may be wondering the same thing :)

Can we list the types of clients we want to attract?

Especially with current conversations about FAC Charter, I expect every student (even the ones who go off to find perm work) to help with the cohort immediately after theirs, and hopefully even give more ongoing support to the FAC Academy. Obviously you can only have "jurisdiction" over those who are part of FAC/DWYL, but wanted to know if you intend to hold people to this? e.g. Will you make this a condition of people freelancing with you?

And come to think of it, could you make that a condition of your finding perm work for people as well?

https://youtu.be/CVfnkM44Urs?t=12m44s

We have tabled this topic for the Founders & Coders Business Meeting this morning, but what _exactly_ are people voting on...?

@sofer can you clarify before the meeting based on discussions we've had so we can answer any questions / clarify doubts before the meeting?

How would time off for mentoring be factored in? Would people need to reduce their days on weeks that they were acting as course leader or would they continue to be paid as if they were working on a project?

Developer Income Example

There are 253
working days in a year; everyone should aim to take off
at least 25 days holiday.

That leaves 228 working days.
So the initial annual income would be 228 days x £120 = £27,360,
_however_ given the be peer-led rate reviews every 4 months we expect rates to be
higher for people who stay for 4, 8 & 12 months.
We expect everyone to have doubled
their pay within 12 months - dependent
on projects turnover - so annual income
could be _above market rates_.

Consider the following scenario:
First let's divide the year into 3 equal parts;
76 days per "Tertile".
Lets assume that a developer's peers deem them
to be _exceeding expectations_ both in technical ability
and "_delighting the customer_" at each of the first two
peer-feedback sessions.

This will mean:

• First 4 months rate is set at £15/h --> 76 days x £140/day = £9,120
• After 4 Months rate increases to £17.50/h --> 76 days x £140/day = £10,640
• After 8 Months rate increases to £20/h --> 76 days x £160/day = £12,160
• Total: £31,920 (annual)¹

We urge people _not_ to focus on the cash amount.
Especially since, if we succeed together
(in delivering great project results)
the peer-determined rates could be considerably more favorable.

But to give you an idea, IBM's Starting Salary for a graduate is £29,000
and they don't do anything resembling the kind of interesting & creative
full-service/stack work we expect to be doing!

How to Find Fulfilling Work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veriqDHLXsw

https://github.com/nelsonic/ateam/blame/d678c2f150a2b7cb8efeb5316eddfd06ade9b336/README.md#L151

Have you ever heard of a consulting / web development services having 100% "_utilisation_"?
52 weeks in a year. 25 days holiday. (5 working weeks) = 47 working weeks ...
Is this the calculation?
We aren't running a Law Firm (where people are encouraged to over-log their hours...)
in web development, there are always "transition" days which are not chargeable to clients...

So including any calculation or graph featuring the number 47 weeks is counter-productive.

This repo needs to be moved to its new home as soon as #13 has been closed.

"If people prefer to be placed directly with employers and this is done through the commercial organisation, there will be a commission going to F&C - the amount is to be agreed as part of the next steps."

This still needs discussion. A 50/50 split is a good starting point for further discussion.

There may also be a good case for a fixed fee, instead of a fixed proportion. Rationale: the longer somebody stays in the space, the higher their value becomes, but the more of that value has been due to their development within dwyl. Let me suggest £2,000 as a starting point.

There is a certain symmetry in thinking of the rent being paid by desk rental (see #20) and the director's salary coming from placement fees.

I prefer to think of "People First, Product Second"
because I'm not a fan of the word "employee" and the mindset it brings...

Nevertheless, I recommend watching this lecture: https://youtu.be/6P2GV1lMtuw by Vineet Nayar former CEO of HCL Technologies

relates to #4

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/307513/the-power-of-teams-a-proposed-expansion-of-stack-overflow?cb=1

ExcitingTimes 😜

I was looking at this again just now when I created the PR and realised I'd omitted the diagrams.

Maybe this is actually part of a wider question about how the finances work, but...

Is part of your biz model that you will share office space with FAC Academy? In which case, how does rent work between FAC Academy and FAC/DWYL?

And actually, following on from #19, what if our "rent" involves free space from the council in exchange for running public-facing courses - will you make participation in these courses a condition of freelancing with you?

Could you provide more information on how this works, perhaps some examples of how it is being used successfully in other companies? Could this affect the atmosphere at FAC if people feel they are being judged by their friends?

@iteles you used the expression "new _organisation_" on several occasions: L32, L53, L140 ...
I think we should nip that in the bud. We have a perfectly good great company already and having to set up a "new company" with new branding, logo, domains, etc. would be time consuming (wasteful).

We should request people's feedback on using using _dwyl_ as the brand.
Such that the menu on the site becomes:

Why? | Who? | What? | How? | Hire A Team!

dwyl already has _several popular projects_ on GitHub and _expanding global membership_ of people who contribute _voluntarily_ (because they use our code in their projects and want to help improve things ...) this means everything we build for clients will already have a built-in support system. Once clients realise the _Power_ of having an Open Source _Community_ and how its Good [for] Business they will flock.

Using way too many words to say things...

A Team of People Passionate about using Technology to Solve Problems

"A Team of Great People using Technology to Solve Real Problems".

This is a process issue and we'll need to have a process-specific repo asap ( #13 ). In the meantime:

Problem: Even with access to our repos and issues, clients still email half way through a 2 week sprint to enquire about progress. How can we improve the process so that they know without needing to ask?

Next steps

• Discuss best ways of keeping clients updated
• Define what clients actually want to know when they ask 'how are you getting on?' (i.e. which metrics are they interested in or do they want something more anecdotal).

Possible ways of keeping clients update [for discussion]:

• Milestone tracking: Adding issues to a milestone and letting clients track completion through that milestone. This was my fist thought as it's the simplest, but I think the problem here is that a) new issues are added throughout the sprint as bugs are encountered or tasks are split into details; b) a significant number of issues may not be closed until near the end of a project, making actual progress non-transparent to clients. We could however, have a milestone that includes only the high level tasks (set up environments, create minimum chrome extension for testing purposes, etc) laid out specifically to be more indicative to the client
• Readme updates: Split out key tasks and metrics into the readme file and track progress on them there
• Red/Amber/Green flags against key metrics: A sort of mini report on a weekly basis. This could be a little client-specific dashboard, with summaries of interesting metrics plus the weekly status - we'd have to manually enter the status data before we can build some interesting algorithms to churn it out.

Something I really enjoy about the freelance work I'm doing is being able to have a relationship with my client. Things like organising meetings, emailing through updates on the project and generally setting the tone for communication are things I would prefer to do myself. Especially if I'm working solo.

Will I be able to continue to manage my projects this way? Or will the agency take over some or all of this communication?

I am concerned that until we know that we can get this to work, the £120/day rate seems quite high. I wonder if we could start at something like £80 or £100/day until we are sure that we have a sustainable model. Could the £120/day rate be an aspiration to aim for after certain revenue targets are met rather than what we start with?

https://tessel.io/blog/76637645290/transparency-keeping-an-open-company

https://medium.com/ideo-stories/want-more-women-in-tech-design-it-40691587033d

I just wanted to add a footnote as to why we thought external employment was problematic.

The problem is that we are reliant on people staying on to support the next cohort of students and that this becomes harder if people leave before the next cohort finishes. Those who stay can (although not always) end up doing poorly-paid and poorly-supervised work and carrying an unreasonable burden of mentoring for the next cohort.

The other point is that external employment is sub-optimal. It would be so much more satisfying if we could get people to the point where they had many opportunities in front of them, instead of just having to take the first junior developer job that comes along.