Crucible Intellect Labs / CILABS

So you’ve gone through the interview process, you’ve signed the contracts, and you’re finally here at CI Labs. Congratulations, and welcome. CI Labs has an incredibly unique way of doing things that will make this the greatest professional experience of your life, but it can take some getting used to. This page was written by people who’ve been where you are now, and who want to make your first few months here as easy as possible.

CI Labs is self-funded. We haven’t ever brought in outside financing. Since our earliest days this has been incredibly important in providing freedom to shape the company and its business practices. CI Labs owns its intellectual property. This is far from the norm, in our industry. We didn’t always own it all. But thanks to some legal wrangling with our first contracts after they were fulfilled, we now do. This has freed us to make our own decisions about our products. CI Labs is more than a Research and Development company. We started our existence as a pretty traditional repair company. And we’re still one, but with a hugely expanded focus. This is great, because we get to make better repairs as a result and we’ve also been able to diversify. We’re a R&D company. A software company. A platform company. And a Manufacturer. But mostly, a company full of passionate people who love the products we create.

Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily. But when you’re a design company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value. We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll flourish. That’s why CI Labs is mostly flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management, and nobody “reports to” anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn’t your manager. This company is yours to steer—toward opportunities and away from risks. You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products. A flat structure removes every organizational barrier between your work and the customer enjoying that work. Every company will tell you that “the customer is boss,” but here that statement has weight. There’s no red tape stopping you from figuring out for yourself what our customers want, and then giving it to them. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Wow, that sounds like a
lot of responsibility,” you’re right. And that’s why hiring is the single most important thing you will ever do at CI Labs. Any time you interview a potential hire, you need to ask yourself not only if they’re talented or
collaborative but also if they’re capable of literally running this company, because they will be. What if I screw up?
Nobody has ever been fired at CI Labs for making a mistake. It wouldn’t make sense for us to operate that way. Providing the freedom to fail is an important trait of the company— we couldn’t expect so much of individuals if we also penalized people for errors. Even expensive mistakes, or ones which result in a very public failure, are genuinely looked at as opportunities to learn. We can always repair the mistake
or make up for it. Screwing up is a great way to find out that your assumptions were wrong or that your model of the world was a little bit off. As long as you update your model and move forward with a better picture, you’re doing it right. Look for ways to test your beliefs. Never be afraid to run an experiment or to collect more data. It helps to make predictions and anticipate nasty outcomes. Ask yourself “what would I expect to see if I’m right?” Ask yourself “what would I expect to see if I’m wrong?” Then ask yourself “what do I see?” If something totally unexpected happens, try to figure out why. There are still some bad ways to fail. Repeating the same mistake over and over is one. Not listening to customers or peers before or after a failure is another. Never ignore the evidence; particularly when it says you’re wrong. So if every employee is autonomously making his or her own decisions, how is that not chaos? How does CI Labs make sure that the company is heading in the right direction? When everyone is sharing the steering wheel, it seems natural to fear that one of us is going to veer CIL’s car off the road. Over time, we have learned that our collective ability to meet challenges, take advantage of opportunity, and respond to threats is far greater when the responsibility for doing so is distributed as widely as possible. Namely, to every individual at the company. We are all stewards of our long-term relationship with our customers. They watch us, sometimes very publicly, make mistakes. Sometimes they get angry with us. But because we always have their best interests at heart, there’s faith that we’re going to make things better, and that if we’ve screwed up today, it wasn’t because we were trying to take advantage of anyone.

We all need feedback about our performance—in order to improve, and in order to know we’re not failing. Once a year we all give each other feedback about our work. Outside of these formalized peer reviews, the expectation is that we’ll just pull feedback from those around us whenever we need to. There is a framework for how we give this feedback to each other. A set of people (the set changes each time)
interviews everyone in the whole company, asking who each person has worked with since the last round of peer reviews and how the experience of working with each person was. The purpose of the feedback is to provide people with information that will help them grow. That means that the best quality feedback is directive and prescriptive, and designed to be put to use by the person you’re talking about. The feedback is then gathered, collated, anonymized, and delivered to each reviewee. Making the feedback anonymous definitely has pros and cons, but we think it’s the best way to get the most useful information to each person. There’s no reason to keep your feedback about someone to yourself until peer review time if you’d like to deliver it sooner. In fact, it’s much better if you do so often, and outside the constraints of official peer reviews. When delivering peer review feedback, it’s useful to keep in mind the same categories used in stack ranking because they concretely measure how valuable we think someone is.

The other evaluation we do annually is to rank each other against our peers. Unlike peer reviews, which generate information for each individual, stack ranking is done in order to gain insight into who’s providing the most value at the company and to thereby adjust each person’s compensation to be commensurate with his or her actual value. CI Labs pays people very well compared to industry norms. Our profitability per employee is higher than that of Galactic Imports or Anvil Aerospace or MISC, and we believe strongly that the right thing to do in that case is to put a maximum amount of money back into each employee’s pocket. CI Labs does not win if you’re paid less than the value you create. And people who work here ultimately don’t win if they get paid more than the value they create. So CIL’s goal is to get your compensation to be “correct.” We tend to be very flexible when new employees are joining the company, listening to their salary requirements and doing what we can for them. Overtime, compensation gets adjusted to fit an employee’s internal peer-driven valuation. That’s what we mean by “correct”—paying someone what they’re worth (as best we can tell using the opinions of peers).

Each project/product group is asked to rank its own members. (People are not asked to rank themselves, so we split groups into parts, and then each part ranks people other than themselves.) The ranking itself is based on the following four metrics:
1. Skill Level/Technical Ability
How difficult and valuable are the kinds of problems you solve? How important/critical of a problem can you be given? Are you uniquely capable (in the company? industry?) of solving a certain class of problem, delivering a certain type of art asset, contributing to design, writing, or music, etc.?
2. Productivity/Output
How much shippable (not necessarily shipped to outside customers), valuable, finished work did you get done? Working a lot of hours is generally not related to productivity and, after a certain point, indicates inefficiency. It is more valuable if you are able to maintain a sensible work/life balance and use your time in the office efficiently, rather than working around the clock.
3. Group Contribution
How much do you contribute to studio process, hiring, integrating people into the team, improving workflow, amplifying your colleagues, or writing tools used by others? Generally, being a group contributor means that you are making a tradeoff versus an individual contribution. Stepping up and acting in a leadership role can be good for your group contribution score, but being a leader does not impart or guarantee a
higher stack rank. It is just a role that people adopt from time to time. By choosing these categories and basing the stack ranking on them, the company is explicitly stating, “This is what is valuable.” We think that these categories offer a broad range of ways you can contribute value to the company. Once the intra-group ranking is done, the information gets pooled to be company-wide. We won’t go into that methodology here. There is a wiki page about peer feedback and stack ranking with some more detail on each process.
4. Product Contribution
How much do you contribute at a larger scope than your core skill? How much of your work matters to the product? How much did you influence correct prioritization of work or resource trade-offs by others? Are you good at predicting how customers are going to react to decisions we’re making? Things like being a good playtester or bug finder during the shipping cycle would fall into this category.

By choosing tn existing product, a way to save customers money, a painting that teaches us what’s beautiful, something that protects us from legal threats, a new typeface, an idea for how to be healthier while we work, a new chair-making tool for the compiler, a spectacular animation, a new kind of test that lets us be smarter, a vehicle controller that can tell whether you’re scared or a toy that makes four-year-olds laugh, or (more likely) something nobody’s thought of yet—we can’t wait to see what kind of future you choose to build at Crucible Intellect Labs.h1. Heading Onehese categories and basing the stack ranking on them, the company is explicitly stating, “This is what is valuable.” We think that these categories offer a broad range of ways you can contribute value to the company. Once the intra-group ranking is done, the information gets pooled to be company-wide. We won’t go into that methodology here. There is a wiki page about peer feedback and stack ranking with some more detail on each process.

What Is CI Labs Not Good At?
The design of the company has some downsides. We usually think they’re worth the cost, but it’s worth noting that there are a number of things we wish we were better at: • Helping new people find their way. We wrote this script to help, but as we said above, a script can only go so far. • Mentoring people. Not just helping new people figure things out, but proactively helping people to grow in areas where they need help is something we’re organizationally not great at. Peer reviews help, but they can only go so far. • Disseminating information internally. • Finding and hiring people in completely new disciplines (e.g., economists! industrial designers!). • Making predictions longer than a few months out. • We miss out on hiring talented people who prefer to work within a more traditional structure. Again, this comes with the territory and isn’t something we should change, but it’s worth recognizing as a self-imposed limitation.

What Happens When All This Stuff Doesn’t Work?
Sometimes, the philosophy and methods outlined in this script don’t match perfectly with how things are going day to day. But we’re confident that even when problems persist for a while, CI Labs roots them out. As you see it, are there areas of the company in which the ideals in this book are realized more fully than others? What should we do about that? Are those differences a good thing? What would you change? This handbook describes the goals we believe in. If you find yourself in a group or project that you feel isn’t meeting these goals, be an agent of change. Help bring the group around. Talk about these goals with the team and/or others.

Where Will You Take Us?
CI Labs will be a different company a few years from now because you are going to change it for the better. We can’t wait to see where you take us. The products, features, and experiences that you decide to create for customers are the things that will define us. Whether it’s a new product, a feature in an existing product, a way to save customers money, a painting that teaches us what’s beautiful, something that protects us from legal threats, a new typeface, an idea for how to be healthier while we work, a new chair-making tool for the compiler, a spectacular animation, a new kind of test that lets us be smarter, a vehicle controller that can tell whether you’re scared or a toy that makes four-year-olds laugh, or (more likely) something nobody’s thought of yet—we can’t wait to see what kind of future you choose to build at Crucible Intellect Labs.

Our Board of Directors will unveil our official corporate statements soon. Please come back for updated information.

In the interim… here is some fan fiction about our company: The Birth of the Glass Phoenix

Next time you’re on Terra come check out our Main Campus: CI Labs HQ

We are hiring:

Hull Structures Specialist

Sensors and Communications Specialist

Propulsion Systems Specialist

Power Engineering Specialist

Weapons System Specialist

Avionics and Tracking Specialist

Quantum Wave Drive Specialist

Transverse ER Bridge Specialist