Read the following very carefully, and if you meet the qualifications and understand the constraints, send your resume over to [email protected].
Recruitment Fraud
It’s big business. Contractor mills, companion interviews, over-employment (doubling or tripling up), sending work overnight, we’ve seen it all. Your background will be checked. Having your video camera off in an interview to Google answers or pull up ChatGPT will make it a short one.
5 Years Min. Experience
You need to have learnt the basics. Nothing against interns and junior devs, but complex problems often require a detailed level of theoretical computer science knowledge. If you didn’t go to university, you need to have learnt it on the job, and know how software teams work. Fizz-buzz won’t cut it; finite state machines, Dijkstra, coin change, Tower of Hanoi, binary trees, Knuth-Morris-Pratt, etc.
Hybrid Only
Remote is fine, but you need human in-person skills, and be able to travel to and work in Southern California when necessary. You don’t need to be in the office every day, but you need to keep normal human business hours, and be able to sit next to other human beings in the same room without headphones on. It could be every two weeks, or on-site for a client, but geography is important.
Triple Testing
You will go through three sets of tests, each of which is done “live” to assess your skills and qualify you meet the appropriate standards. Failing gracefully is as important as getting it right:
- Quick-fire thirty-minute quiz: Can you explain the difference between the short-ternary and null coalesce operators, face-to-face?
- Difficult brain problem: Given a brutal coding function you can’t solve with ChatGPT, how do you think?
- Beer in the pub: An hour of chatting over new tech; figuring out your sense of humor; how you deal with conflict, etc.
Zero Tolerance
Unlike professions such as medicine or law, there are no real standards software teams adhere to in order to prevent abuse. There’s always one or two in a team who cross the line from cavalier to dysfunctional. If you’ve been allowed to get into some bad habit antipatterns, they won’t wash.
- Incompetence: If you don’t know your stuff, or need two weeks for a basic task, you won’t get the normal free ride. “I don’t know” is not OK.
- Spaghetti: Bad, verbose, or bug-ridden tech debt code smell is not acceptable even on a tight timeframe. PRs are reviewed and approved for quality.
- Punctuality: You won’t get to be five minutes late for a standup or drift in at 11.30am.
- Procrastination: If you want to be paid on time, you need to respond to that Asana/Jira ticket on time.
- Groupthink: Respectfully arguing your point clearly and backing down when you’re wrong.
- Hubris: You’re going to work with people who are smarter than you are.
- Remote Abuse: Pyjamas, poolside ebaying, weed after breakfast, clocking off at 2, mouse-jigglers – we know.
- Jargon Fog: Speaking clearly and concisely without a flood of thought-terminating terminology.