Have you witnessed the benefits of agile values and software craftsmanship practices? For most of us at Pillar, discovering the agile mindset has been so life-changing that we aren’t content to keep it to ourselves. We’re passionate about helping others achieve the tremendous value made possible by new approaches to software.
If you’re interested in joining us and making an impact on how the world writes software, read on.
We’re looking for new team members to:
- Work alongside people at organizations adopting agile, leveraging your experience to offer advice and mentoring as a fellow team member
- Coach people along their journey, supporting them as they uncover the many counter-intuitive epiphanies that make agile so revolutionary
- Teach by example, writing valuable software that’s also sustainable—to us, that means employing practices that support agile principles and demonstrate professionalism
- Participate in the agile & software craftsmanship communities, sharing your insights and learning from the experiences of your peers
The following topics excite many of us at Pillar; if you have reasoned opinions on and experience with these, you’ll be in great company:
- Popularizing Behavior Driven Development, Lean Startup, and other emerging methods
- Contributing open source tools that make it easier for others to write higher quality code.
- Emphasizing client-side craftsmanship of web applications written in HTML5, CSS3/Sass, and JavaScript/CoffeeScript from the ground up
- Learning from the recent Cambrian explosion of awesome programming languages like Scala, Clojure, and Haskell
- Improving how we teach others the virtues of concepts like DRY, SOLID, separation of concerns, and Clean Code
- Meeting clients where they are by applying agile practices to situations outside the norm; and in the context of their situations, innovating all-new practices that exemplify agile values
That last point—of meeting clients where they are—is critical to understanding Pillar. There’s no shortage of evidence that agile practices offer tremendous value in the context of greenfield Ruby on Rails applications. But at Pillar, we’re often asked to answer challenging questions like:
- What can software craftsmanship practices offer teams maintaining large legacy codebases?
- How can developers experienced in older languages get started with practices like BDD/TDD?
- When some areas of an organization are slower to change than others and it causes friction between groups, what’s a responsible approach?
- How can team members overcome the challenges of being geographically-distributed or time-sliced?
Due to the breadth of technical and social challenges we take on, the best predictors of success at Pillar are an open mind and a thirst for continual learning. As a result, someone inclined to disregard context to dogmatically advocate their favorite technologies or mechanically prescribe Scrum practices would likely struggle to succeed at Pillar.
Despite the variety of their situations, several activities are relatively constant across Pillar teams:
- Story testing / BDD / ATDD (often Cucumber or Fitnesse)
- TDD (often xUnit, Jasmine, RSpec)
- Continuous integration (often Jenkins)
- Version control (often git or git-svn)
- Pair programming (often with humans)
If you’re interested in joining Pillar, we’d love to get to know you. Rather than just see a résumé and cover letter, we’d like to have a conversation with you, peruse your Github repositories, read your blog & twitter feeds, and learn about your community involvement—all so that we might start to understand what makes you passionate about software.
