There is a fair paradox in which Frappe often finds itself situated. For the sake of writing this, I realised I had understood it only in fragments myself. The very fancy and Frappe phrase, pick your own work, has always needed so much explaining to do beyond being only on papers. It feels like something that might collapse under its own optimism. The first time you hear it, you do not believe it in a clean way. You believe it the way you believe a slightly unbelievable story told by someone who has nothing to gain from lying, but also nothing to lose if you don’t believe them.
What you should start with or borrow from Rushabh Mehta’s a decade old essay is that initial growth created confusion. Self direction was given in practice. Apparently, when Frappe was much smaller, this way of working just happened naturally. Everyone could see most things that were going on, so problems were visible in the open and someone would eventually pick them up. But as the company grew, new people joined with a different expectation. They brought with them habits developed elsewhere like hierarchies, fixed responsibilities, etc. And understandably so. Freedom inside organisations often sounds attractive in theory but unsettling in practice.
The good news, ofcourse, is the realisation of it being a very sustainable way for a team of 100 to operate and still make profits and build talented teams for 10+ years now. The buying mechanism here is trust. Members are trusted to do justice to the project they take in becasue they bring the best interest and skills and are given full authority to put it into use. When you start there, work doesn’t feel like handed down chore. The road then is either linear or painfully bumpy depending on the kind of problems you are drawn to. There are unusually invested people at Frappe thriving in self chosen projects for years. Rohit loved watching manufacturing documentary ‘How it’s made’ and looking at the step by step process when he was a kid. It’s 10 years, he’s working on manufacturing module at Frappe. Nishant has always fancied cute, aesthetic fonts on street arts and café despite being an engineer. We’ll soon celebrate 5 years of him being the principal designer at Frappe. Sayali, during her college days, taught 100+ children and student things like basic math to tech awareness. She now brings that same instinct at Frappe School, largely as a training specialist for around four years. And the list of people returning to themselves through work goes on.
But that is also the half truth. A large part of the room has already switched their current projects and teams at Frappe. This means, for the sake of a better interest (or need) there is space in this structure for everyone to take a safer bet on themselves and begin again.
Take Aysha for example. Freshly out of college as an intern, she started with Frappe Wiki 2 years back and has changed 2 projects since then. Her most recent switch was from Frappe HR (payroll) to Frappe Cloud (billing). “Mostly because I was very fresh at work, I took up Gameplan after my internship without much thought. I could feel there was enough work to do but something was missing. I switched to Frappe HR and worked on the payroll module for about an year. It was interesting and I enjoyed it initially. But I also wanted to get more involved into the architectural side of engineering and so billing in Frappe Cloud looked like the next exciting thing to put my mind on. I now enjoy looking after site creation and site update on FC.”
If not only project change, Frappe has a long line of people with domain change. Mangesh joined Frappe when he was 20. He carries a diploma in engineering and has previously interned at FOSS United followed by Ente. “I met Rushabh at the Frappeverse and found my way into Frappe through that. I started working on L2 support tickets on Frappe Cloud. I would write blogs, took webinars and would also push code. I also mentored a new L1 engineer. With time, I was not as interested in engineering anymore and had decided try something else before leaving. I’ve always been sketching distorted, gothic and comic-style characters. I’d easily spend nights making pretty presentations on Figma. I’ve now joined the marketing and design team at Frappe, and this is my first proper design project. Right now, almost all of my interest is going into designing the new editorial style theme for Frappeverse Mumbai.”
For some people, it doesn’t take very long to realise when the shoe does not fit. “Lending was my first real exposure to production-grade software. Being a computer science grad, I understood very little about enterprise systems when I started. After like 6 months, I got naturally pulled toward infrastructure and self-hosting problems on Frappe Cloud. After one lunchtime chat with Aditya, my belief got stronger and I switched to FC. I now work on building our own hardware infrastructure which should make us less dependent on virtual machines from Amazon Web Services and Hetzner. I like that there are so many layers to understand here, and always another system or problem waiting to be solved.” said Ayush.
One way to read all of these stories is that freedom is heavy. It forces you to ask yourself: What am I actually good at? And, what do I actually care about when no one is looking? If you see closely, “picking your work” is an exercise in honesty. It’s resting on the belief that people do better work with what holds their interest instinctively more than what they are only assigned to do. Perhaps that also makes it less about building great companies, and largely building spaces where people do not have to step out of themselves to keep going.
