thoughtbot is a small software development and consulting company located in Boston, MA and founded in 2003. The majority of clients we work with are founders of early-stage startups who we help build the smallest thing possible, get it to launch, and iterate from there. We also have our own products and open source contributions.
In the best-case scenario, at the end of our engagement with clients, they are financially stable, have a Rails application written and deployed to our standards, and are hiring their own world-class design and development team. For anyone who wants to work at a promising early-stage product startup, consider these jobs.
We are founded and built by developers and designers. We are profitable and don't have any outside investors. Therefore our primary motivation is to create a small, expert team of developers and designers who love doing what they do in the way they do it. We believe that the success of our clients, the quality of our products and our code will excel given the foundation of an enjoyable place to work in the way that designers and developers want.
Driven by that desire, we have a way of doing certain things that makes us different from other places you might work:
We believe that for the kinds of projects and clients we work with sales people and project managers simply get in the way. Instead, we choose to focus our energy on building a great team of designers and developers who work directly with customers.
We limit work to 40 hours per week because we believe that anyone working 12 hour days will not be doing their best work. We believe that it's better to have an open, honest relationship with our customers about what is feasible, rather than working unsustainably to hit an arbitrary and unrealistic deadline. [Read more]
Our entire advancement and reward structure is predicated on the idea that doing good work on client projects is the base level of expectation. You are rewarded for exceeding those expectations by instigating change in the way we do things, launching new products and open source projects, and accomplishing things that we didn't even think to list here.
We don't want to be a 50 person consulting company. We plan on keeping the team small. However, that doesn't mean we don't want to grow revenue. Our plan to continue to grow the company involves diversifying our revenue across both consulting, products, and training. We want to introduce services that scale beyond just adding people to the company.
The company is split up into five teams, most consisting of two developers, one designer, and an advisor. Each team focuses on only one client project at time. The remainder of your time managed by you and is spent working on open source, products, and workshops. [Read more]
We've learned that no matter how exciting a project is, you'll get bored with it over time. In order to keep things fresh, and to take advantage of the great benefits new blood on a project brings, we move people around on projects about every two months. On a typical rotation schedule, you'll likely never work on the same thing for more than four months at a time.
If you're thinking about working with us you might be interested in reading more about our philosophies and process in our playbook.