“Because They Treat Me Like A Human”

On three occasions this past month I’ve heard high-calibre software engineers explain that they have moved to a new employer because the prospect of being treated ‘more like a human’ was higher. It’s unsettling to hear this with such regularity.

There are many instances where engineers are wrongly positioned at the delivery end of product development. In these cases they are excluded from the early visionary conversations and instead are sent often incomplete technical requirements before being expected to build the end product imagined by someone further up the product development food chain. The better engineers highlight issues with the requirements but are driven to continue to code in order to meet project deadlines. Not surprisingly, when the code is deployed as V1.0 and it contains bugs or incomplete features, the engineer is blamed for not delivering what was imagined. And how could they?

In our world software engineers are the linchpin between vision and magical listener experience. Without them, AirShr would be a hallucination.

My partner Opher and I have deliberately strived to create a culture which helps engineers do their life’s best work and develop a real sense of ownership over AirShr’s future. Operationally, this means we angst over identifying and introducing the best talent we can find into the AirShr family. Here’s the language we use to describe the culture somebody could expect to walk into:

Your colleagues, like you, are at the top of their game and love doing their life’s best work in a highly collaborative team environment that encourages curiosity, creative problem solving, intelligent risk-taking and acting like an owner.

To walk our talk our engineers join us as peers at the beginning of the design process and it’s common for me and Opher to rely heavily on their expertise to characterise and solve complex design challenges before a line of code is written.

Last week we closed our second round of funding. It’s a terrific milestone for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that it gives us the opportunity to hire new engineers. So if you know a capable engineer looking to do their life’s best work and be treated much more than just as a human, send them here (it’s the first of a number of roles to be advertised).