My Year With Confio
Yesterday I came back from the Confio company retreat in Malaga. In a month, my second half-year contract with Confio expires, so I find it an excellent opportunity to share my experience with this extraordinary group of people. Let me tell you about a couple of key moments that stuck in my mind and why I am looking forward to prolonging my cooperation with the company.
Recruitment process
Recruitment is one of those things which are either long remembered or quickly forgotten. It was the former with Confio.
I have been conducting technical interviews for a couple of years and have participated in them for a decade. I’ve seen many different approaches, and I have many thoughts, but I don’t think that an interview like this is standard.
I believe my first interview was conducted by the co-founder, which is not that surprising in a 20-person company. But what was surprising was that I don’t remember a single strictly technical question. How can you hire a senior software developer without checking his skills? You can’t. But you can be aware of who you are talking with. At the time of the interview, I was an organizer of the local Rust Meetup and was involved in organizing a severe Rust conference, aka Rusty Days. I had several Rust talks, wrote an article, and my GitHub already had content.
Confio knows that a good business relationship starts with respect which begins with reading information delivered by the candidate. The conversation with Ethan was about our previous experiences, technologies we used, how we (not “I” — this was two-people talking, not interrogation) approach problems, and what I think about blockchain. I didn’t feel interviewed. This whole conversation could happen while mingling after our Rust Wrocław Meetup and it might look the same.
There is one question I was asked: what do I want to do in the future. Sure, there are jokes about “where do you see yourself in 5 years,” which is not a fair question for an interview. Usually, the question is terrible because why ask if the answer doesn’t matter? Do you think any serious company would align its vision to its employees’ needs? Well, maybe not, but if so, Confio is not serious. My answer was very confident — I wanted to do less development and run some Rust training/consulting business instead. Today I am involved in building CosmWasm Academy.
Possibly there was already a plan to run such a thing before I got contracted, but I talked to people — many of us got opportunities to develop in the exact direction we wanted to.
Proven to be Wrong
How can it be a great experience? Well, let me set a scene.
There is a pleasant workday, another Wednesday. I try to push my code to the repository, and the whole pipeline fails. Reason? Our software has to support some old version of the compiler, meaning like a couple of weeks behind the newest — I wanted to use some super new shiny features. I wrote the Odyssey about how it is so good to upgrade the compiler version on CI to the newest one and how much we can do with it. Now happy with my genius, I started a chess game, waiting for applause from the whole company. The other technical co-founder read my argument and provided me with precise reasons why I was wrong. He could probably hear the impact of my ego hitting the ground 300km away.
Why is this experience important to me? Because at this point, I got convinced that competent people drive the company. It is not one of these places where the head of engineering doesn’t remember what the code looks like. In fact, Simon is also a key contributor and maintainer to the CosmWasm stack.
The Birth of Sylvia
Sylvia is my oldest daughter's name, but she was born long before I became a part of the Confio, so let’s not talk about her. Instead, I want to mention how proactivity is handled here.
The story happened when I was about half a year in the company, so I had some grasp on the product we were delivering. I liked it, but I expressed that our API is clunky and doesn’t really fit what I describe as an “idiomatic Rust”. There are reasons for that, and I understood them, but I wanted something better. I decided to write down all my concerns and propose a vision of what a more expressive API could look like. The discussion started, and our founders were also involved in it. We took a look at solutions in other blockchains. As a result, I am working on the Sylvia Framework — the implementation of my idea as an open-source library on top of our solution. And I am paid for it.
Confio is a company that has no tunnel vision on predefined priorities. If one of us has an idea, it is considered. If you are proactive, you can win way more than just nice words for trying — you can end up working on your own product if only you can prove it is worth it.
A Happy Employee is a Productive Employee.
This is obviously a commonly known statement, but I want to share how Confio understands it.
It is nothing new for the company that I am a co-organizer of the local Rust community. Because of various reasons, we held our Meetups, but recently favorable circumstances allowed us to come back to them. There was one problem — time. Being the father of three kids with a full-time job and other responsibilities, I have not too much time for such activities. I decided to talk to my leader to find some way for the partnership between Rust Wrocław and Confio so that I could justify working on it in my work time. I have no idea what did I expect, but not this. The reason was evident to my leader: it makes me happy. Those couple hours a month don’t matter to anyone, but making me happy makes all other hours way more valuable. And happy Confio contractor on local Rust event cannot be bad for us. After all, as an academy member, it is in my job description to promote Confio at events.
The Retreat
Last but not least — the recent retreat. It is a fresh experience, so it is difficult to talk about it from a perspective, but it dispels any doubts about what to do with an expiring contract.
In general, I do not like this kind of retreat. Meeting with dozens of people whose only thing we have in common is the company has proven to be very boring to me. But I decided to go there to not fall out of the business circle. Now I know I couldn’t have made a better decision.
I met people of many nations, all with similar experiences with the company as mine. We talked about our vision and had a chance to brainstorm ideas (here is where Sylvia got its name). My plan to go to the hotel right after lunch never came alive — I couldn’t resist walking and talking to people I just got to know. I have no idea how our founders did it, but they managed to create the company based on people with matching attitudes and values. Now I am looking forward to the next opportunity to meet at least some of our distributed team.
What’s Next?
Now I need to redefine what I want to do in five years. Confio fulfilled all the goals I set for myself and pushed my self-development to the sky. It is not even a question of whether I want to sign yet another contract with them. The question is, what goals would we set for the next half a year. Confio is a Spanish word for I trust. “Confio” fully that I will not regret this decision.
