Boston Office Manager

About two years ago, I joined thoughtbot as our Office Assistant and now, Office Manager. I’ve decided to relocate to our new San Francisco location, so we are looking for a new Office Manager for our Boston office.

In this unique position you are an extremely important contribution to the general happiness of the entire thoughtbot team, and directly contribute to the success of our company on a daily basis.

We are looking for someone who displays the following:

• Daily punctuality, efficient coordination of office matters, energetic personality, and consistent welcoming hospitable presence 
• Charismatic creativity, outstanding communication, problem-solving, and decision making skills (for example, if a bird flies into our office window and cracks it, or say, just hypothetically speaking of course, if eleven of your coworkers get trapped in our building’s elevator)
• Experience with administrative support and daily office management; as well as event planning
• Able to work independently
• Attention to detail, ambitious attitude and eagerness to learn something new everyday
• Desire to grow with thoughtbot over the long term

As the Boston Office Manager, you will: 

• Work closely with management, as well as San Francisco and Sweden Office Manager(s) on tasks which may include: hiring, accounting, events, marketing, annual company gatherings and events, as well as human resources duties 
• Manage relationships with vendors who are essential to fluid office operations as well as other companies and resources within the Ruby and Boston tech community
• Coordinate and arrange Usability Testing Sessions
• Be able to host evening or weekend company or community event(s), at least once a month, which will be balanced with regular working hours
• Assist in booking domestic and international travel for conferences, workshop attendees, client meetings

Plus, but not required:

• Ability to use Photoshop, Illustrator, GitHub, and Twitter 
• Lives in Boston proper/Cambridge (ie: on the Green, Red, Orange lines), with excellent knowledge of Boston neighborhoods
• Secret super power and/or knowledge of Star Wars [or] Arrested Development

We aren’t looking for someone who is eventually hoping to be a programmer or designer, however ability to use a computer and the navigate internet effectively is a must.

This full-time position will have a competitive salary, that will depend on experience, and exceptional benefits, which include unlimited time off and 100% of medical premiums paid. If you know someone who might be interested in this position, please forward this along to them or have them email their cover letter and resume to resumes@thoughtbot.com

Hiring in Stockholm

Our operations in Sweden are coming online and we’re now looking to expand our team there.

As you may know, we do not have sales people at thoughtbot. Instead, the entire team participates in the sales process, and we focus on doing great work to build our reputation. That being said, there are always some designers and developers who are stronger with pursuing leads, acting as a project advisor, and managing a small schedule than others. If that describes you, we want to talk.

We’re of course looking to hire great designers and developers, but we’re especially looking for developers or designers who are particularly strong with these sales skills right now.

So, if you are already in Stockholm, Europe, or anywhere else in the world and willing to relocate to Stockholm, please get in touch.

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.

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.