The people you will work with

Joseph has worked from Ecuador the whole time. We started this way six years before the pandemic made it ordinary, and it suits the concentration engineering work needs. Plenty of our clients have their own people in an office, and we work inside whatever they already run.

Working this way also forces things that are easy to let slide in an office. Documents stay current, because they are the only version anyone has. Meetings get scheduled with more care, because a meeting costs someone their concentration. Questions get written down where the rest of the team can read them.

There was an office for a while. There is not one now. We book a coworking space when there is a reason to be in the same room, and we get together for specific occasions.

After one discovery we told a client that the problem they wanted to solve was not strong enough to build a product on. They did not build it.

We stopped another project because of the way the client spoke to people on the team.

Most of the time it is smaller than that. We push back on features, and we suggest taking things out.

We also build things to be maintained. Work we hand over should still make sense to whoever picks it up, including someone who does not work here.

We hire for how someone works with other people: proactive and communicative, and also sensitive, kind and modest. The technical bar is not the hard part to get right.

Someone who wants to cover everything and makes big claims tends not to stay long.

It works the same way with clients. If you expect engineers at their desks twelve hours a day, that is not how we work.