This is an abridged/edited version of an internal document we send to every Lindy engineer before they join. If you’re too lazy to read the whole thing, here’s what Lindy itself had to say when summarizing it:

The Lindy Engineer Standard of Excellence is an uncompromising guide that sets clear expectations for engineers to build a "holy shit" product that advances Lindy's mission to Free Humanity from Work. It emphasizes velocity and impact over process, with a strong focus on shipping customer-facing features quickly while maintaining high quality and attention to detail. Engineers are empowered with significant autonomy, but are expected to take full ownership of their work - from conception to production deployment - while maintaining a relentless focus on building features that deliver real value to customers rather than getting caught up in architectural abstractions or process overhead.

About this document

This covenant sets out, with excruciating clarity and detail, the expectations of a successful engineer at Lindy, along with the tools and mechanisms by which you’re empowered to hit and exceed those expectations.

The Score Takes Care of Itself

This document’s inspired by Bill Walsh’s excellent The Score Takes Care of Itself, which exhorts you to focus on your inputs. If you do that, and get every single one of these - even the most minute - exactly right, then the output (“the score”) will take care of itself. It follows that one should be excruciatingly clear with everyone on what exactly is expected of them. It’s hard enough to do a good job when you know exactly what your job is; it’s impossible if that was unclear to begin with.

Before we start

This document is absolutely filled with sentences such as “it’s your expectation to…”, “It’s up to your judgment to…”, “you are responsible for…”. This is intentional! We value engineer empowerment. However — these responsibilities aren’t carried alone. Everywhere you have empowerment and agency, you also have smart and motivated coworkers around you to help. If you have questions about how to prioritize work, which steps to skip when moving fast, and whether something is a good idea or use of time, rely on the people around you. You can always ask for advice - especially if you do it the right way.

How this document is structured

This guide has 4 parts:

• What your job is and isn’t*.* We start with the mission — what we’re here to do, and what winning looks like
• What your first few weeks / month will look like. After the mission, we discuss in detail what to expect on your first day / week / month.
• Ongoing performance expectations. Once equipped with our mission and how to get started, this sets out what we expect from you in terms of productivity and judgment, on an ongoing basis.
• How we work / what tools we have / how we use them. Lastly, we discuss in detail every aspect of engineering at Lindy. This section contains descriptions of our system and codebase, an overview of important tools for developing/debugging/observing the product, how changes end up in production, etc.

The Mission

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Ship a holy shit product that, long-term, brings us closer to our vision of the AI employee and, short term, builds a growing business.

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This is the same mission as the PM Standard of Excellence! That’s intentional. While your day-to-day as an engineer by nature mostly consists of writing and reviewing code, landing PRs, setting up new infra, etc., those aren’t the goal. The goal is to serve our customers and our vision always, above all else.

Once you accept the mission of building a holy shit product, a few anti-goals emerge which are worth spelling out explicitly.