Rebase Now
Beside my day job as a full-stack entrepreneur in Jolly Good Code, I also organise monthly Ruby meetups and RedDotRubyConf as my side projects. Due to the exposure from these events, I get these requests pretty often:
Hi, we are hiring. Do you know where I can find developers?
or
Hi, I would like to work in Singapore. Do you know which startups are hiring?
Whenever I get these requests, I try to advise or help as much as I can:
- “Please go ahead and post on our Facebook group.”
- “Please come to the meetup and you’ll meet a lot of developers.”
- “I’ll put it up on meetup.com under our next scheduled meetup.”
- “I’ll do a shout-out on my Facebook/Twitter.”
Honestly though, I am equally clueless on where to find developers. Although I am in the community, but developers actually don’t come to me everyday and tell me that they are looking for a job.
Occasionally, I might get wind of that a developer is looking for a change and hence succeed in doing the match-making, but it’s still pretty rare.
I really want to help these companies find good talent (well.. because there are a lot of articles that claim that there are no developers in Singapore), and I also want to help developers find awesome companies to work in. Hence I do what I can with those requests, but “I” don’t scale.
These companies/developers I am sure have already looked at job sites, however those are probably not working right? So what can be changed?
I am a developer myself, so what do I look for when searching for a job? What’s important and will help me decide on my next move?
Culture
Number 1 for me would be “Culture” as I would like to work in a company whose culture I can be aligned with.
Example:
I love open source software and I also love contributing back to open source. Test-Driven Development/Continuous Integration are practices I embrace. Would I be happy/comfortable in a company if they do not do any of these?
Technologies
Next on my consideration would be “Technologies” as knowing your stack will allow me to evaluate if I would enjoy working with those technologies.
Example:
I have been doing Ruby for about 8 years now and I still love the language. Prefer JavaScript over CoffeeScript and EmberJS/ReactJS over AngularJS. Elixir or Go or might be cool, new languages to explore.
Salary
Lastly, we all need to feed ourselves and our family. Money is important. Maybe I really buy into your startup idea and I can accept equity over cash, but let’s hear the budget first.
With all these considerations in mind, I looked at some of the job sites and noticed that none of them explicitly requires their job postings to have “Culture” or “Technologies”, so these are probably hidden (or omitted) in the Job Description (JD) itself. “Salary” is also an optional field.
So if I am job seeking, I can’t search on things that are important to me and I have to find out from the JD or ask the company during the interview. These sites are probably optimized for the company’s hiring experience because they are the ones paying to put up a job post (not job seekers!), hence my (and developers like me) experience doesn’t matter?
Let’s have jobs board that asks for details that matters!
In order to solve my scalability issue and to help developers find great jobs, Juanito Fatas and I decided to build a simple jobs board — Rebase Now which emphasises on “Culture”, “Technologies” and “Salary”.
We call it “Rebase Now” because we think that switching your job is akin to rebasing your life against a new company. Git pun.. Get it?
Rebase Now is currently targeted at/for developers only and so companies who would like to “Post a Job” would have to authenticate with GitHub. That’s our litmus test to make sure that these are real Tech companies!
Currently, on the homepage, you can browse jobs by culture or technology. Please give us suggestions for “Company Culture” that matters to you
as a developer we would be glad to include them in!
On the search results page, you can further refine your search based on “Technologies”, “Commitments”, “Remote”, “Expected Annual Income”, etc.
I sincerely hope that this experiment in an alternative kind of jobs board would help to influence companies to have a better engineering culture, help better match companies and developers, and to solve my problem.
Note: Please also ask the company about the “Culture” that they have “checked” and verify that they do what they say. :)
Finally, a shoutout to the 5 job posts that are up on Rebase Now:
- SourceClear is looking for a Security Researcher
- Perx is looking for Ruby on Rails Developers
- Grain is looking for Full-Stack Rails Developer
- OpsManager is looking for Full-Stack Ruby on Rails Developer
- Kaligo is looking for Senior Software Engineer
What else do you look out for when you search for a job? Let us know too!
Do you have a tech-product idea but lack the technical expertise to realise it?
At Jolly Good Code, we specialise in rapid development of high quality MVPs. Let us help you turn your idea into reality and ship it. Contact us.
