Dear Experienced Ruby Dev, Come Join Our Team

by Dan DeMeyere - @dandemeyere

First thing's first, I'm not a recruiter. You won't see the following terms in this post: 'hacker', 'rock-star', 'pirate', 'guru', or 'ninja'. I'm not trying to get referral money for getting someone hired. I have no ulterior motives other than trying to find someone who has solid Ruby experience that can join our team, tell us what we're doing wrong, teach us to write code that can scale, and be a part of a team that we have worked hard to build.

Now that the disclosure is out of the way, let me introduce myself. My name is Dan DeMeyere and I'm a developer at thredUP. We have 3 development teams: web, ops, and mobile with 4, 3, and 2 developers on each team respectively. I'm currently the lead for the web team and while I have a solid and practical understanding of Ruby (our website is a Rails app), I'm no expert. I want to learn and so does the rest of the team. Some people say they want to learn, but we mean it. We do 'lunch & learns' on a regular basis to teach each other about new technologies we come across, interesting solutions we implemented, and new libraries/classes we've written, but we're still lacking that go-to Ruby developer who can push us to the next level technically.

While this post might seem like a plea, it's not written out of desperation - we just care a lot about our team and what we're trying to accomplish. We're not slouches, either. Our team is hard-working and highly productive. We roll out features every week and we make sure not to accrue technical debt along the way. We have RSpec and Cucumber test suites and a CI server to run them.

Our Technology Stack

While we're not locked into anything in particular, here is what we're currently working with:

  • Rails 3.1 (soon to be upgraded to 3.2 on Ruby 1.9.3)
  • HAML/SASS/CoffeeScript for our views
  • MySQL (and a couple MongoDB/Mongoid models)
  • EC2, RDS, and S3 for our server and hosting needs
  • Capistrano for deployment
  • GitHub for repository management
  • Asana for project management

If you're curious what else we use and work with, I'm happy to expand via email.

Working at thredUP

Working at thredUP is great. My favorite question to answer when I'm interviewing someone is 'why do you like working at thredUP?'. I have a field day with that question because I genuinely love working at thredUP. thredUP is a meritocracy. Your contributions to the team and company trump everything. Better yet, upper management cares and they pay attention to everyone. If you're putting in extra work, it will not be lost on them. They're also transparent and accessible. Our CEO shows us the same presentation he shows our board every month. He'll tell you how much money we have in the bank, what our burn rate is, what he's excited about, what he's worried about. There are no closed doors at thredUP, we're all in this together.

Also, thredUP has some great job perks:

  • Work From Home Wednesdays
  • Catered lunches twice a week (plus fully-stocked fridge/pantry)
  • No vacation day limit
  • Big ass Apple LED Cinema display and a computer of your choosing
  • Office at 2nd & Market in downtown San Francisco right next to the BART
  • Competitive compensation

I could go on about why working at thredUP is awesome, but what it comes down to is that you would be joining a close-knit, no-ego dev team that is always looking out for one another. We all tackle bugs and help with Customer Service if a user is experiencing a technical glitch. If something breaks, we don't point fingers at the person who coded it. If you write a piece of the app that experiences a lot of bugs, you're not going to be pigeon-holed into fixing them. No one is stuck 'owning' any piece of the app - we spread the knowledge so the team stays flexible. There are no rogue devs on the team - everyone contributes in a coordinated effort.

We have fun too. Other than the standard company-wide happy hours, we've been known to throw Halo gaming parties, have Scotch-drinking Settler's of Catan nights, and do things like Casino Night. You'll also hear a lot of Arrested Development and Super Trooper quotes being thrown around mixed-in with a cavalcade of sarcasm. Lastly, and what the development team holds very close to our hearts, you'll be exposed to our treasure trove of awesome Gifs that we post during the day in our Campfire chat room.

I'm not listing any ridiculous job requirements that you see in job postings. If you're genuinely interested, have the Ruby experience we need, and are able to work in SF, please email me - dan@thredup.com.