Why You Should Work for Teamprise

May 11, 2006

Teamprise just announced that we're hiring a software engineer to work on our Java integration to Microsoft Team Foundation Server. You can read the details over on the corporate site, so I'm not going to repeat them -- I'm going to tell you why you should apply.

The concentration of really good developers is obscenely high
For being so small, it's almost intimidating at times, the breadth and depth of software development knowledge1 contained within our organization. SourceGear and Teamprise are just large enough to have a very varied skillset amongst developers, and small enough that there aren't any bozos.2 At some of the larger software shops I've worked at, you may have the prestige of working with a MacArthur fellow, but you're also feeling the pain of working next to a guy who would unemployable at McDonalds if his dad wasn't the Director of Sales for North America.

The bosses here aren't idiots
The owners of the company are developers. Developers, primarily, like to develop software. So there is precious little to keep you from doing exactly that while you're at work. There are few scheduled meetings, and the ones that exist are short, on topic and useful to the development group. There are several ad-hoc meetings where developers walk into each others offices to bounce ideas off each other. If you've been unlucky enough to sit in meetings so that you can schedule meetings... this isn't that sort of place.

You won't be worked like a slave
I like adreneline rushes as much as the next guy, and feeling like I'm a critical piece in shipping code is great! At least, it's great when it doesn't last 14 hours a day. Here you can write great code and have a life.

Downtown Champaign is a great place to work
Right, so it's not NYC or San Francisco or Chicago. Champaign isn't a big city, but we've still got a lot going on, and Downtown is the epicenter of all the cool things we do have3. Lots of arts, lots of good food, lots of fun. If I walk out the door to our office building, I'm surrounded by hip coffee shops, theaters, bars and restaurants.

And hanging out at any of these places, you're likely to find smart, interesting people all over. The University guarantees lots of smart people4 hanging around, a lot of diversity and inevitably at least a small group of people interested in whatever obscure interest you have.

It's a great place to work. So apply already.

Footnotes

  1. And, to be fair, other stuff, too. From obscure European Heavy Metal to beermaking to haute cuisine to comic books, there's a lot of knowledge about non technical things, too. ↩

  2. The author excludes himself from comparison to ensure the bozo count is zero. ↩

  3. It could be argued that campus is the epicenter of it, but those people only like campus because they never leave their lab or they like the bars that let them drink underage. ↩

  4. We once had the distinction of most PhDs per capita in the US, but the most recent data I can find on that is from 1994. Either way, you get the picture. ↩