Working at Hospitable

Hey all, during the last weeks I tweeted a few times [1] [2] that we are hiring at Hospitable. And for sure as a company we also did some marketing for our open positions. Based on that I got questions by some people - if I can help them to get in, how it is to work at Hospitable, if our team is really that great and so on. So this post is my attempt to answer some of these questions - and probably also let my colleagues know what I think. 😉

First of all: YES our team is that great! 🎉 period.

But let's go through it one by one.

Hiring

We are still growing and because of that also hiring. Not only now and not only engineers. Our open positions change over time, but we are nearly always hiring and also a lot of these positions are engineer roles.

And that link is nearly all I can do for you. In case we know us since some time I can recommend you, but that's all. I can't skip you the first round or anything - everyone has to go through the whole process. And that's for a reason - beside the technical or hard skills for every job we want people that will fit in our existing team and culture. That's why one interview of our hiring process, nearly the most important one, focuses entirely and only on your team fit.

PS: I also had to go through all these steps - there's no exception.

My time at Hospitable

I started at Hospitable in October 2022 as a Software Engineer. So right now I'm working at Hospitable since a little over one and a half years. Since the beginning I'm working in a smaller team on one of our services. This is already little hint regarding our software architecture - I think there's no official name but I would compare it to Moons of Uranus. My teammates switched a little over time as the team/project has nearly started with me. Since roughly a year we are a fixed team of one product manager and four engineers and got a fifth engineer some weeks ago. And I really have to praise my team, not only my direct team but also all the other colleagues in the company as everyone is doing an amazing job and everything is only working as it does because all are doing their best.

But what makes the team so great?

First of all, the lived culture - even if we are 100% remote you can always reach out to your colleagues for whatever reason. It can be a job topic you need help with, or just a crazy idea you have and want to discuss and get a second opinion or as it would be in a regular office for a quick private donut. We also have several channels for hobbies and interests where you can just meet same minded people and share your thoughts.

Second, the quality of work - we focus on team fit as you can learn your job. And that pretty quickly as we have an insanely skilled team in all departments. We have crazy good engineers, but also hard-working support who solve so many questions on their own, we have pretty cool sales and marketing people and our product managers at least seem to keep everything in mind and organized. So whichever department is interesting to you: you will have some great colleagues to learn from. For engineering specifically I can say that every single engineer can do outstanding things on their own. But for sure also we have problems and questions from time to time and that's the moment you can ring the bell and have access to an elite squad of engineers willing and able to help you out.

How's work as an engineer?

I don't want to generalize it as this is my perspective and experience and it can be different for the others. To me the first thing that comes to mind is challenging. But in a good way, as how boring is dev when your job is to create CRUD endpoints every single day? At least to me it's my first job I really have to focus nearly all the time and be concentrated. It's partially as everything is English and I'm German - but also as the tasks are really challenging. Beside the typical code work there are other things that belong to the typical tasks of engineers. As keeping an eye on Sentry for possible new errors, shadow test any new code you deployed and just be responsible for what you are doing. We also have a rotating on-call duty, each week another engineer is responsible for any incoming incidents - day and night. That sounds scary at first, it isn't. We do our jobs good enough that we don't wake our on-call colleagues regularly. Most of the times it's related to some foreign service incidents. Overall I would say: you get paid well, but also have to deliver what you are paid for. So in case you just search for a well paid job you don't have to do much: search more.

Moons of Uranus

I said it above and probably only a few can imagine what I mean. So Uranus is the planet with the most moons. And that's similar to what we have. We have one big scary monolith application and a few services. These services aren't microservices but applications in their own that sometimes grow more, sometimes stay small. Our team is working on one of these moons - one of the larger ones.

I would like to re-use one quote of my last post:

With great power comes great responsibility.
— Quote Investigator

That sums it pretty good up. We are all grown and there's no hierarchy you can hide behind. You deployed something big on a Friday evening? You are responsible for it. BUT that doesn't mean that you are alone. And that's what makes that team so great to work with. Even if you totally f***ed up you will still have a team that will help you out. As there's no "I" in team - we win together and we lose together.