How we work at Pally.

Hey, I’m Wyatt, the CTO at Pally. I wrote this to give you a sense of what it is like to work here and the principles behind how we work.

Quality through health

At Pally, we move quickly and want to do our best work. That takes focus. Sometimes it means staying with a hard problem until it is done. Sometimes it means taking a walk, getting coffee, scrolling for ten minutes, or going out to lunch.

The point is not to perform intensity. It is to make the best choice for the work in front of you. We want you to have the freedom to do that.

For me, that is tea. I keep a tea set at my desk and use it all day. It gives me a small thing to enjoy while I work and helps me stay present.

We take the gym seriously too. Unless prod is down, there is no reason to skip taking care of yourself. We encourage people to go together and keep each other accountable.

Engineering philosophy

We are a product company. Every piece of work should connect back to making Pally better for the person using it, directly or indirectly.

That does not make the work shallow. Technical depth is infinite. Part of being a good engineer is knowing where that depth matters, when to explore it, and when to stop. AI makes that judgment more important, not less.

Modern software engineering has become managing AI worktrees. There is no way around it, and if you disagree, this is not the company for you. But we expect you to have the same clarity into what your code is doing as if you wrote it yourself. Imagine showing up to a standup and not knowing how your implementation works. Yeah... let’s not do that.

Some things we’ve learned:

• Building features is now cheap. Experimentation is good. Feature flags are great. Deleting code is best.
• Writing features is no longer hard. Writing the correct features is.
• Implementation is easier than it used to be. Good implementation is still difficult.
• Keeping context in your head is more important than ever.
• There is no benefit to letting AI drive the conversation. Don’t be a meat proxy.

Interrupting yourself is good

Some of the biggest changes in our lives have started with a small change in perspective. If you have been on the same problem for six hours, ten minutes of stepping back can change the trajectory of the product, the company, or your life. Like spending the time to read this blog and come work for us :)

I personally encourage you to take a block of at least thirty minutes in the day to think at a higher level: what matters today, what you are assuming, and whether the problem you are solving is still the right one.

Growth

We want to invest in you and your growth. The more successful you are, the better it is for you and for us. If you want an introduction to someone we know, want to put a class or books on the company card, want to take leadership training, or need help pursuing an opportunity that matters to you, we will do everything in our power to make it happen.