Link Motion README The Definitive User Guide Author: Mika Reinikainen Copyright © 2018 by Link Motion Oy All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of Link Motion Oy. Font: Neuton (SIL Open Font License v1.10) Document version: 2.94 www.link-motion.com About This Book 5 Who Are We? 6 How We Do It 9 Organisation Structure 9 Virtual Teams 11 Distributed Work 12 Values 16 Getting Things Done 17 Our Toolbox 19 Communication is Key 26 Be the Bearer of Bad News 27 Give Feedback 28 Customer Communication 28 The Rumour Mill 29 Insider Learning 30 The Human Touch 30 Practice Makes Perfect 31 Proactivity 32 Craftsmanship 34 Customer Projects and Programs 36 What Are We Selling? 38 Everyone Is a Sales Person 41 Self-Development 43 Annual Reviews 45 Rainy Days 46 Keeping Secrets 48 Hiring 50 Who Should Join Us? 50 Closing Words 52 About This Book Welcome, neophyte! This book is a general introduction to working at Link Motion. It talks about who we are and where we want to go. Much of what is said here is based on real experiences that we have gone through over the years. Many things have been learned the hard way and it is only appropriate to share our experiences. After you are done with this book, you should have a pretty good idea of what it is like to work with us. The book is full of tips and guidelines, but it does not contain detailed information about company policies, regulations or technical topics, which probably would have gotten outdated before we had managed to get this book out to print. For that sort of in-depth information, the reader is invited to Link Motion Confluence1. 1 https://confluence.link-motion.com/ !5 Who Are We? Our story started in 2001, in Finland, under a different name: Nomovok. The world was a very different place back then. Embedded Linux was pretty new and in general businesses looked elsewhere. Linux in consumer electronic devices (let alone cars!) was never going to happen, they said. We started off as a consulting business working on Linux-based handheld devices and web services. Slowly but surely as Linux gained traction on various gadgets, we started looking for new applications for our embedded Linux-fu. This led us into the first forays into automotive industry around 2007 and eventually culminated in the delivery of a full-fledged digital instrument cluster for the 2014 Lamborghini Huracán. Finally, armed with the knowledge and confidence of many years of challenging projects, we embarked on a journey to build our very own automotive computer, or carputer, as we like to say. Following in Albert Einstein's2 footsteps, the general idea behind our carputer is to help the customer to keep things as simple as possible (but no simpler). Cars today are extremely complex beasts: dozens if not hundreds of small computers handling specialised tasks and communicating with one another over various protocols and mediums. But why use multiple computers when a single computer would do? 2 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#1930s !6 Most features, such as instrumentation and infotainment, can be handled by a single powerful carputer. Benefits are many: unified look and feel, tighter integration and of course lower costs. By looking for synergies between different functions and segmenting the vehicle into a handful of complementary domains, we can cover most of the computation needs with a small number of smartly designed, multi- functional carputers. Our carputer is designed to be the brain of the car. On one hand it is connected to the vehicle buses - the backbone through which different computers and ECUs (Electronic Control Units) communicate with one another in the vehicle. This makes it possible to, for example, determine vehicle speed and show it in the instrument cluster or update other computers and ECUs connected to the backbone. On the other hand, the carputer is connected to the Internet to enable features such as over-the- Illustration: Link Motion - in the air updates, remote control and diagnostics. box elimination business since 2015. It goes without saying that designing the system from the ground up to be secure is critical to prevent malicious attackers from doing harm to the vehicle occupants. Security cannot be added as an afterthought and is therefore of paramount importance throughout the life cycle of the vehicle all the way from the drawing board to the scrapyard. For the customer, a simpler system means relief from several headaches: fewer components, simpler wiring, less weight, easier integration, lower costs and fewer glib sales people to deal with. In a !7 nutshell, the vision that we have set out to achieve is to carry the heavy burden of architectural complexity on behalf of our customers. At the end of the day, however, it is the wizardry of our individuals that really keeps the company going and our customers happy. The skills and imagination of every one of us is what truly propels us forward. With new technical innovations and some bold thinking, we are hoping to secure a foothold in the brutally competitive world of automotive engineering for many years to come. In the face of mega-corporations laden with bureaucracy and moving slow as molasses we aim to thrive as a small, creative and agile company set to keep things simple. We want to foster a culture of technical mastery and at the same time be mindful of business realities. Contrary to computer science, business is a game that is played by human players with rules that sometimes defy logic. This is the playing field we have been given and sometimes we need to apply soft skills to navigate through it. While at it, we want to build a work place that is founded on openness, equality and freedom. A place where oddities are not abhorred but cherished as sources of creativity and genius. A job where candour is the modus operandi instead of groupthink, equivocation and obscurity. The journey is the destination. We recognise that a journey that is unpalatable eventually leads nowhere. This book is meant to shed light on who we are, where we want to go and how we are planning to get there. Today we may not yet be where we want to be. Hopefully the information in the following pages will bring us a little bit closer! !8 How We Do It Organisation Structure Building a carputer is a massive undertaking perhaps best captured in numbers. Our unassuming car stereo sized little box alone comprises of nearly two thousand discrete components. That is several times more than in a modern mobile phone. On top of that, the software stack consists of some 500 components with altogether over 80 million lines of code. As if that were not enough, the sandbox we are playing in is tightly constrained: requirements from several formal standards, safety regulations and de facto industry practices need to be met. It goes without saying that our organisation needs to work as a well- oiled machine before we can even dream of witnessing our product on the road. Over the years our company has grown organically into a large multi- site construction yard with many people working in parallel on tasks that take us step by step towards a common goal. While the headcount necessarily increases over time, we strive to keep the company fairly flat. A deep hieararchy with multiple levels of management would risk hindering communication and adding to organisational inertia. Thus, our principal aim is to build the company around teams that specialise in a given technology or organisational function. That is not to say our company has forgone management. A lean (and sometimes mean) management team is there to patiently listen to a steady influx of Dilbert3 jokes, but also to set goals, review 3 http://dilbert.com/ !9 achievements and to make sure we are all heading in the same general direction. In practice this happens in the form of planning sessions (also known as Version Planning meetings) at four week intervals and bigger all-hands meetings four times a year. In these sessions accomplishments are presented, old plans are revised and new plans are made. It is also a great chance to share news that might otherwise get buried in every-day background noise. Illustration: Our goal is not to build a rigid, sky high organisational pyramid (left), but an agile network of self-guided teams working towards a common goal set by the equally agile management team (right). Once the goals have been set, teams are given freedom - within the boundaries allowed by our quality management system4 - to meet them. Success is measured by numbers that reveal important facts about how we are doing as an organisation such as the number of implemented requirements, bug trends and success rate of customer deliveries. And since good quality cannot be ensured by relying only on data, constant reciprocal human feedback is an important part of our processes. 4 For readers suffering from insomnia, Link Motion offers the cure pro gratis. For bedtime reading, just head to https://confluence.link-motion.com/display/QMS/ Introduction+to+the+Quality+Management+System. Author notes that after waking up from slumber, it is recommended to go back and actually read the text, lest you shall feel the wrath of our Quality Manager. !10 The key to our planning workflow is in constant iteration. As a wise person once said: plans are worthless but planning is everything5.