In our Life@NGINX post, we answer the question “what is life like at NGINX?”. In this post, we want to expand on a related topic: company culture. Senior Vice President and General Manager of NGINX at F5, Gus Robertson, recently noted how compatible the NGINX and F5 cultures are. In this post, we want to expand on why we think the NGINX culture within F5 is so special.
Culture Is Key to Sustaining Success
Company culture is a popular topic in today’s headlines, and an important one considering the number of hours each of us spends at work. But what is company culture? More importantly, what is NGINX’s culture?
When we talk about our culture, we consider how our values affect the past, present, and future of our employees, our products, and our customers. We remember that our experiences shape our opinions and outlook – from our CEO to our interns, from our Cork office to our Sydney office and beyond. Regardless of where our teams are in the world, or which function we work in, the five core values we have held since the beginning are Curiosity, Openness, Progress, Excellence, and Mutual Accountability.
Read on to discover more about what we mean by each of our core values at NGINX, and if what you read reminds you of yourself, then take a look at our current vacancies!
NGINX’s Core Values
Curiosity
At NGINX, curiosity is more than an eagerness to learn. Curiosity is not being afraid to ask why. It is digging into our customers’ goals and how we can help to exceed expectations. It is looking to the future and challenging the status quo, with the goal of making our products and customer service even better. It is having the autonomy to pursue a new idea, and being encouraged to try. It is #funfactfriday, our tradition of profiling one of our teammates each week, highlighting interesting facts about his or her life history and interests outside work. Each of us looks for ways to improve, to come together, and to make NGINX better.
Openness
Openness has many facets at NGINX: it starts with our open source roots, grows with each person who joins us, and brings us together as friends and as a family. We bring our whole selves to work: our experiences, our knowledge, and our pun jokes. We partner with our community, our customers, and each other. We look at problems and solutions from all angles. We strive for openness about where we’ve been, where we are, and where to go next. We celebrate our achievements together. The most important part of openness, however, is our transparency. We believe in providing everyone with all the information they need to succeed. This permeates every facet of the business, as explained by F5’s CEO, François Locoh-Donou.
Progress
Progress is built into our DNA. NGINX co‑founder and CTO Igor Sysoev’s passion for solving the C10K problem led him to become the author of NGINX, and inspired by that passion, we continue to build products on the cutting edge of technology. Our desire to develop our professional skill set not only helps each of us on our career path within the NGINX business unit, but it also helps our teams to collectively push forward and reach further. Advancing our technology is important, and the NGINX family is the core to our success. We support each other individually through career growth, and as a family through initiatives like team‑building events, diversity discussions, and social gatherings.
Excellence
Excellence is what NGINX’s reputation is built on. It’s putting our best foot forward every day, building the best products for our open source users and enterprise customers alike, and supporting our colleagues, teams, and company. Excellence has been the goal of NGINX since its inception, and it’s the key to our identity within F5. Each of us strives for excellence individually; together, we strive for it as a team.
Mutual Accountability
Mutual accountability is a simple concept popularized by the former CEO of GE, Jeff Immelt. He sums up mutual accountability this way: Do your job, and take care of others along the way. To us, it means that we don’t operate in silos. We work as a team, supporting each other for the sake of our customers and our community. When we face challenges, we put our best foot forward because we know our teammates will do the same for us. Good teamwork has mutual accountability at its core, making it key to NGINX’s award‑winning and consistent success.
Join Us If You Agree
Curiosity, Openness, Progress, Excellence, and Mutual Accountability – separately, each of these values is important. Together, though, they unite and drive our underlying success. As we consider our values and as we work to maintain our culture as a positive environment, we know that curiosity fosters openness, that openness drives progress, that progress enables excellence, and that excellence depends upon mutual accountability. If our values speak to you, check out Life@NGINX on our blog, and apply to join the NGINX family.
