Who & How we hire

• Your potential to acquire new skills quickly is critical. This is the strongest indicator how successful you will be in our team.
• We care about your past accomplishments in any field, not just software development. Problem solvers are field-agnostic.
• We don’t care where you went to college or that you went to college. It has the lowest correlation to success in our team.
• We have philosophers, biologists, neuroscience grads and people from many other disciplines coming together to solve tough problems. We believe diversity in background and experience is a boon to the team.
• We, the engineering team, handle the interview process from the first contact to making an offer. We believe hiring should be personal with the candidates being the center of attention.
• We hire by consensus. We believe the entire team is hiring, not just the manager.

What we value the most

Independence & Exploration

Independence

An independent engineering team means many things:

• Our management style from top to bottom is very hands off. We expect AND want to be able to work in our own style, at our own pace, and with our own solutions.
• We encourage each other to take immense responsibility as a consequence of the free-range development mentality, and regard failures in delivery, timing, or implementation extremely seriously, as these are all threats to our independence.
• This sensibility also makes its way into our hiring process. When we are interviewing a candidate we want to see the candidate make choices. Maybe they aren’t correct, but being self-driven and deliberate are necessary to work as part of this team.
• Our continuing education also fit this independence model. We self-teach. Everyone who works with us has been able to learn relying largely on their own focus and work ethic. This continues with us reading, watching material online and going to conferences and meetups.

Exploration

We also need to be exploratory:

• This means not just being open to novelty, but looking for it.
• People on our team like finding new, better solutions. They like improving things in new ways. They will advocate for new technologies, new patterns, new practices.
• We like risk takers. These type of people are willing to try new, unknown ways of being successful.
• Candidates who stand out are ones that are curious and ask many questions. The candidates who try out their solutions often tend to progress through the problems faster.
• A fearless mentality also drives our interpersonal communication. Our often bizarre, hyperbolic, and pedantic conversations come from a group that is comfortable with strange topics and new ideas.

(originally written on 2018-10-31 with co-author: Max Sechzer)