apprentice.io is now available to all employers

Over 150 developers and designers have applied to apprentice.io and 17 have been accepted. The majority left their previous jobs to apprentice with us and we’re currently booked through September, with some apprentices scheduled for 2013.

A pricing change for employers

Based on feedback from employers, we’re changing the way the program works.

Starting immediately, there will not be a monthly fee for employers to participate in the program. Instead, there will be a more traditional placement fee of 20% of the first-year’s salary when you hire a graduating apprentice.

It is now free for employers to sign up and view all apprentices.

We hope removing barriers to entry and using a traditional payment model will resolve concerns employers have expressed about the program, ensuring that we can continue to train new developers and designers well into the future.

A note about recruiters

The cost of hiring from apprentice.io is comparable to using a traditional recruiter. We’re certain that like us, you’ve interacted with recruiters before…

They do very little to justify the expense. They spam networks to find people, have a poor understanding of current technology and designer/developer motivation, and send you individuals of a quality you could have found with a Craiglist post.

In contrast, apprentice.io starts with a selective application and interview process. We pay the apprentice a salary for 3 months to pair program with our experienced team and take days’ worth of our workshops.

The designers and developers of apprentice.io are more qualified and better trained than what we’ve had sent by recruiters.

Share and share alike

We would make more money by hiring all apprentices and billing them out as consultants but that doesn’t help solve the shortage of talent that our friends at other companies (including our clients) are feeling.

It’s also more attractive for apprentices to have more options after they graduate from the program. Not every person wants to be a consultant. Every apprentice in our program, however, is interested in making great products, interfaces, and software.

If you want to hire world-class designers and developers, please join apprentice.io.

Your next great teammate

Every company we speak with could use a great web designer or developer on their team. We think we know where to find such mysterious figures.

What does a great teammate look like?

Imagine a programmer next to you, noise-canceling headphones on, punishing his keyboard with forceful blows, punctuating each change by slamming the heels of his hands against his desk. While tests run, jolly meme photos float into Campfire.

Imagine this person writing test-first code that is pushed to production each day. Imagine them refactoring ruthlessly and making other team members stronger through feature branch code reviews.

37signals doesn’t have to imagine. Nick Quaranto now works with them.

Nick was an apprentice at thoughtbot. We cannot claim responsibility for his motivation, problem solving abilities, or other Nick-isms, but his time with us was not an aberration.

There are plenty of great designers and developers worldwide

75% of the new team members we hired last year started as apprentices.

Last year, we met Prem Sichanugrist, a lifelong Thailand resident. You’ll find him currently ranked #32 for most commits to Rails.

Galen Frechette creates useful and beautiful stuff like this. Alex Godin was in Techstars New York before he could legally buy a pack of smokes. Gabe Berke-Williams is becoming a prolific (and often funny) open source contributor.

All are former thoughtbot apprentices.

Running an apprenticeship program isn’t easy

We’ve now run an internal apprentice program for about two years. We’ve also run design and development workshops for years.

Like many things, these are easy to start but difficult to regularly do well. Apprentices will temporarily slow their mentors down. Questions will arise.

How much time should be spent pairing? Attending workshops? Reading the Pickaxe or watching Peepcodes? Reading incoming code reviews from a variety of projects?

We’re getting good at many of these subtle details. As a fairly efficient design-and-code consultancy, we’re the right team to try to push the limits.

apprentice.io

We’re now opening up our apprenticeship program externally for any company that would like to sponsor apprentices. We’re calling this new program apprentice.io.

When you sign up on the website as an employer you get immediate access to the bios of all of the current apprentices and the others from all over the world that we already have scheduled for this year.

As an employer, you contact and interact with the apprentices directly. Over time we’ll grow the apprentice.io platform to provide mentor-to-employer updates on the progress of apprentices, and more.

For little more than you may already pay job boards and a lot less than you might pay recruiters, this money now goes to train people.

We think that’s a powerful idea: what if instead of recruiting, you educate?

Sign up as an employer.

If you’re a designer or developer interested in apprenticing, please apply.

If you just want to talk about this, please email me at apply@apprentice.io or call me at (877) 976-2687 x113.

Turning Our Attention Back to Hiring Developers

We’re relative small, so we just only have so much bandwidth to devote to hiring. Over the past few months, we diverted our attention away from hiring more developers to finding another great designer. Thankfully, we’ve found a great designer, and he’s going to be starting at the end of next week. So, the time has come to turn our attention back to hiring more excellent developers.

The ideal individual will have been using Ruby on Rails extensively (probably since before 1.0), have an excellent knowledge of Javascript, HTML, and CSS, and experience in TDD.

Our team works in a relaxed and educational environment. We limit our work weeks to 40 hours, stock the fridge with drinks and snacks, and provide lunch on Fridays. Our project teams are small, and we have an incredible focus on creating excellent code that not only follows, but defines Ruby on Rails best practices. Everyone on the team is given the freedom to work on Open Source projects and internal products like Hoptoad, Paperclip, and Shoulda.

The competitive salary will depend on how awesome you are, includes medical benefits, 401k eligibility, and relocation to Boston (if needed). As usual, we’re looking for people who are willing to relocate to Boston, but we’re willing to consider remote work for really great people who can’t relocate. If you were going to be remote, we’d likely ask you to work in Boston for some time at the start of things so that everyone can get to know each other.

If you are interested, contact us at resumes@thoughtbot.com. Feel free to describe why you want to work for us, what your past experience is, what your salary requirements are, who your work references are, a bunch of sites you like, a list of hobbies, or anything else you think represents who you are or who you want to be.

We also have this and other positions available, check them out on our jobs page.

We’re looking to hire another great designer.

Hey Everyone, hows it going? Good? Yeah, same here.

We’re looking to hire another great web designer to join our team full-time in our Boston office. The right person will have experience designing user interfaces for web applications, have good typographical skills, a strong foundation in design principles, excellent XHTML and CSS skills, and will be as passionate about great design, semantic markup, and web standards as we are about our Ruby code.

The competitive salary will depend on how awesome you are, includes medical benefits, 401k eligibility, and relocation to Boston (if needed).

Our team works in a relaxed and educational environment. We use the latest web development technologies, frameworks and techniques, and embrace both agile development methodologies and a “getting real” project philosophy. We limit our work weeks to 40 hours, stock the fridge with drinks and snacks, and provide lunch on Fridays.

Did you know that in addition to being the at the seat of our nation’s pants, Boston is also the premier location for designing the web?! It’s true, just look at these guys.

If you are interested, contact us at resumes@thoughtbot.com. Feel free to describe why you want to work for us, what your past experience is, what your salary requirements are, who your work references are, a link to a portfolio, a bunch of sites you like, a list of hobbies, or anything else you think represents who you are or who you want to be.

thoughtbot is hiring…

We’re currently looking to hire a Lead Graphic/UI Designer. We’re looking for someone who has the same level of passion and desire web application user interfaces and for elegance about the markup that drives an interface that we do about our back end code.

We’d love to find someone to work in our Cambridge, MA office with the rest of the team (or in NYC in our ‘satellite office’), but we are willing to consider all qualified candidates, no matter where you’re located.

For more information about the job, and application instructions, see our job page.

Also, we’re always interested in talking to great people about the potential of working at thoughtbot. Specific positions we have in mind are listed on our job page.