The call out about being "Customer focused" is key! Many engineers use the Individual Contributor path as a means to just solve engineering problems and an exit route from product teams. No matter if your customers are internal (other engineers) or external (actual clients), understanding the business is equally important.
An Engineer's goal is to solve problems. Technology is their tool to do so and the more you understand the business' problems, the more effective you become at using the right tools in the right ways.
A Distinguished/Principal Engineer's role is a multiplicative technical leader whose use of these tools in an effective manner will impact solving customer problems in a more effective and streamlined manner. Thus, building customer empathy is very important.
NewsCred is the world’s leading content marketing platform. We build software that supports marketers in content planning, creation, publishing, and analysis. We help brands speak to their audiences by providing both bespoke original content and content licensed from the world’s leading publishers. Finally, as pioneers in our industry, we provide unique professional services and leverage our best in class technology platform for all of the world’s content.
We recently hired an outstanding engineer who graduated from a bootcamp and previously did not apply because we had an archaic requirement around "BS Computer Science or equivalent" in our job description.
We have taken out any mention of "culture fit" which to me means more of the same. Instead, we measure culture addition. How will this person add to our culture?
We took out all mentions of prior knowledge and experience in our entry level job postings. In our more experienced posting, we only ask for prior work experience building software for X years. We list only our stack and even caveat that by saying that it can change. I can wager that most software engineer positions fall in this category.
Another relevant point here is that women are less likely to apply for positions with a predefined list of requirements even if they are only missing 1 of them as opposed to men. So why are we shooting ourselves in the foot with all of these requirements?
NewsCred is the world’s leading content marketing company. We build software that supports marketers in content planning, creation, publishing, and analysis. We help brands speak to their audiences by providing both bespoke original content and content licensed from the world’s leading publishers. Finally, as pioneers in our industry, we provide unique professional services and leverage our best in class technology platform for all of the world’s content.
There are multiple positions open for Full Stack Software Engineers and Senior Software Engineers, along with many others. See link above for more details.
It appears that they object to ads in principle ("if you feel like you need more ads in your life..."), which is something I respect immensely. I wish more people made a stand against advertising. It is psychological manipulation that we are guilted into accepting for the good of capitalism.
It's not even for the good of capitalism: it transforms the market in to a competition to weaponize psychology instead of creating value -- something most of us would argue is a market inefficiency of the modern system.
Advertisers will eventually strangle capitalism by increasing the irrationality of market actors until the basic mechanism of effective capital allocation breaks down.
Some would argue we're toeing or slightly across that line.
Who is going to advertise on gail.com? The numbers of visitors is meaningless if the vast majority of your visitors take 2 seconds to look at the site and say "Ooops I made a typo, this isn't the page I wanted. Let me fix that." Most visitors probably don't read much of the site at all, let along click an ad on it.
