Engineering teams that value EQ over IQ

We value kindness and empathy over intellect and strong opinions.

We want engineers to look forward to going to work every day. The biggest impact on that is always going to be the people you work with, which is why we place an emphasis on hiring people who are thoughtful, kind, and self-aware. We’re the antithesis of a typical bro-y startup – we care about you as a whole person, not just a resource. In other words, engineers are not just boxes that can be moved around on an org chart.

At Culture, we’re building bioreactors and cloud-based platforms that allow companies to easily make and scale bioproducts, powering research behind everything from chicken-free eggs and palm tree-free palm oil, to medicines, natural dyes, and more. Because our company is very engineering-driven (see more below), hiring empathetic engineers is critical. We regularly talk with our customers (in fact, we know many of them by name), so engineers can better understand their perspective.

Our interview process actively screens for empathy, self-awareness, curiosity, and kindness. It’s not about culture fit or a certain gut vibe; we use a specific rubric to assess empathy and self-awareness. It’s also designed so you can show us your best. Instead of all-day onsites, we allow engineers to schedule their final round interviews over the course of a week. Maybe you feel you do your best technical work in the mornings, or maybe you’d rather only interview in the afternoons.

Moreover, during times of turbulence, such as the events surrounding the death of George Floyd or the riots at the Capitol in DC, our CEO Will makes sure to check in with the team and reiterate that if you need to take time off and prioritize self-care, that’s more than okay. During the height of the pandemic when our lab shut down for three months, no one from the team was laid off. Not only that, but our founders also made sure to keep paying our temp contracting staff. Creating an environment where folks care about one another and have meaningful interactions not only makes life better, but it also helps us create the best product possible and succeed as a company.

Angaza engineering culture = rigor + empathy

Building solid software for our users and their typical operating environments requires equal parts rigor and empathy. The majority of our users:

• Use phones that cost less than $50
• Have 3G internet connections, at best, and pay for them by the MB
• Work in the informal economy, some multitasking across multiple small businesses
• May have to travel hours (or days), on foot or by bus, to attend training

Empathy guides our decisions and improves the user experience. Rigor enables successful execution of the decisions we make.

Angazans are interviewed specifically for EQ. We believe it is a hard skill, required to compete successfully in our markets.

Finally, Angazans are encouraged to deepen understanding and empathy by working directly with our customers. We strive to build strong relationships with our widely dispersed user base. While meeting in-person was paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, optional travel is often supported. Whether it’s working out of our Nairobi office or riding a boda in Burundi, these experiences can help connect your daily work to direct improvements in people’s lives.

We have an incredibly impressive team, but we demonstrate that with our work, not by talking about our resumes.

We’re proud to work with people who are talented, humble, and authentic. As an early stage company, we have significantly more options and constraints when making decisions. This means our challenges are inherently more multifaceted and ambiguous than those facing more mature businesses.

These problems raise the bar on the level of collaboration we need across our team and often require us to wear lots of hats (or at least try on new ones). For instance, in his first month at Plus, one of our software engineers, Zach, quickly ramped up on our code base and started making major contributions to our app. However, in addition to his engineering work, he also helped us iterate and improve on our recruiting process after going through it himself and synthesizing feedback from other members of the team.

People join Plus because they want to not only build a great product, but also build a great team, culture, and company from the ground up. We are looking for people who can put the team above themselves and who can admit to being wrong or not knowing an answer. We know that no one on our team is perfect, and we would rather work with imperfect people who are open to growth and learning. It’s important to us to build a team that works together to achieve exceptional things, which is why we look for great team players, not “10x engineers.”

At the end of the day, business is all about people.

We make a product for people. We are a company of people. If you can anticipate the needs of a customer, client, or teammate – that is worth its weight in gold.

The cannabis industry in particular requires high EQ. Cannabis affects everyone differently and everyone has their own opinion on cannabis. It is our responsibility as a company within this space to understand, empathize, and continue to progress the cannabis space. Not everyone on our team consumes cannabis. We cover the spectrum: some team members consume cannabis daily, while others have never, which is more than okay! What’s important is that we all understand the market, the role our product plays in it, and are committed to Jane’s mission.

Our team is close-knit (see Heavily Team-Oriented below) and we all share and celebrate our wins together. Having empathy on a team is really powerful. We believe any win from any person feels like a win for the entire group. It’s our strong emphasis on empathy that helps us lift each other up, and laud and applaud one another in an open and non-competitive way.

We’ve passed on candidates who were technically strong but would be difficult to work with. People who feel above the team and that there’s a ‘right’ way of doing things (aka their way) won’t succeed at Jane. There has to be wiggle room, which is why we know we need the full context surrounding decisions. It’s important to collaborate to fully understand all factors at play, whether it’s a certain timeline, timeframe, resource constraints, or potential iterations in the future.

At the end of the day, we’re working with humans and we feel that at a very deep level. As Abe, co-founder and CTO, says, “As a leader, I’ve learned to be a lot more vulnerable and focused on how I can best empower people to do their jobs. There has to be mutual respect, always.”

If you ask any member of our team what makes Newfront unique, the first thing you’ll hear about is our culture.

We’ve built a team of people who are empathetic and supportive. Having empathy enables us to deeply understand the needs of our customers, who vary widely across a number of demographics. After all, it doesn’t matter how good of a coder you are if you can’t hear your customer’s needs.

Emotional intelligence is modeled from the top down at Newfront. You’ll never hear “that’s not my job” no matter how high you go. As an example, our co-founder and CTO held office hours to help anyone in the company troubleshoot two-factor authentication setup. Simply put, we do what needs to be done to grow our business and we keep our egos in check along the way.

EQ is so important to us that we actively screen for it during the interview process.

Collaboration is a pillar of our culture and you’ll often find folks pair programming. The only way this can be successful is if we’re empathetic and emotionally intelligent. That’s why we look for people who are curious and eager to both share their knowledge and ask for help when needed. In order to reduce bias, we ask a set of predefined questions during our interviews. We’re not as concerned about how technically strong you are – we care more about seeing how you’ll work as part of a team and how you give and respond to feedback. Even during the technical interview, we’re not looking to see if you gave us the most robust technical explanation for your code, but rather can you explain it to another person in a way that makes sense? So much of EQ can shine through based on how people write documentation. It’s not just about finding the shortest way to make a line of JavaScript, we value writing code in a way that’s readable and easily explainable.

The old adage goes, "It isn't what you say, it is how you say it that matters."

We strongly believe in the power of empathetic communication and value it highly, so much so that it is actively selected for in our interview process. Specifically, we are looking for people who listen before speaking, are thoughtful with their words, and understand the impact they can have on others. Especially as we embrace a remote-first culture, EQ is super important to foster a strong sense of team and trust, and even more so without the ability to see people in person.

Prioritizing EQ also has a tangible impact on the product development and engineering lifecycle. As a company, we're able to have tough discussions without ever crossing any lines, and are able to "disagree and commit" without any resentment. It also contributes to our blameless culture, where wins are celebrated as a group and misses are never any individual person's fault.

It’s incredibly important that everyone we work with feels comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”

We care deeply about our team and who we work with. So much so that we dedicate nearly 85% of our interview to culture. Our first two phone screens involve zero coding and focus purely on how you approach problem solving interpersonally. We want to work with folks who will care more about the company reaching the right answer than their ego. We invest in high-EQ individuals who will develop into great leaders.

Clear and transparent communication is important to us beyond our company internal presence. Customers also want transparency. People who value and covet IQ tend to be less open to sharing the mistakes they make, and we’re the opposite. If we have an outage, we are transparent on how and why it happened.

Dopplerites strongly prefer a team of diverse backgrounds. By having people from different walks of life, we will be more well-rounded, thoughtful, and empathic as a company. Alongside gender balance, we want to work with people who have something unique to share with us. Some of the best people we have worked with in past companies started their careers in unexpected ways with unique twists and turns. Those experiences helped shape who they are and thus what the company became. Join us in shaping Doppler!

The way we interact with each other to achieve a result matters just as much as the result itself.

At Orbit, we value EQ and communication skills a lot. If you’re looking to spend 99% of your time coding without talking to your teammates, this might not be a fit. Engineers who join our team inherently need to be able to empathize with others, consider different viewpoints, and connect with humans as much as (or more than!) they do the code.

Your ability to work well with others is more important than your technical skills.

Having technical experience and knowledge is important to us, but only if it is coupled with EQ. Not only are we diverse in our abilities, backgrounds, and personalities, but so are our customers. As an early stage company, it is critical to us that we only hire people who recognize the importance of empathy and emotional intelligence.

In the past, we have passed on technically gifted candidates because they did not share our mindset around how to work as a team. As a small but nimble team, we operate with the assumption that everyone is working toward the same goal: creating the best experiences for our users. To that end, we look for people who are empathetic and curious, who have opinions but don’t assume they are always right, operate with an innate sense of urgency, are willing to take smart risks, and take ownership of their work. During the interview process, we gauge this through the different formal (1-1 discussions) and informal (grabbing food with the team) interactions we have with each candidate. We hope candidates do the same evaluation of us. Ultimately, even the most brilliant minds cannot build good products if they can’t work well together. This is twofold for us as we serve a wide variety of customers ranging from restaurants, to retail, to medical offices.

“Always do what’s human” is one of our favorite values.

While technical skills are important, we care about hiring people who are empathetic and curious (you can meet the team here!). This starts with our interview process, which we’ve redesigned to make a more enjoyable and comfortable experience for candidates. We’re incredibly intentional about our job listings and share concrete examples of what you can expect in your first one, three, and six months in the role.

Beyond our interview process, we prioritize being human throughout our employee experience. Whether you need to take time off for your health, or you’re going to dinner with friends right after work, your life as a human always comes before your work as a ReadMe employee! Our team is full of empathetic people who will support you whenever you come across a bump in the road, be it in work, or life.

In addition to valuing EQ on a personal level, our commitment to you as a human is also codified in our benefits! Not only do we have unlimited PTO, but we actually have a minimum of 3 weeks, which means managers will send you a friendly reminder if you’re not taking enough time away from your computer. We recognize that the pandemic has been challenging for everyone, and leadership sets a good example by being vocal in all-hands meetings to encourage folks to take time off to recharge, and by taking time off themselves!

We look for people who enjoy “raising all ships.”

The spirit of Makelog is all about helping technical and non-technical people converge on a common language to better communicate with each other. Our goal is for our customers’ technical teams to be better equipped to speak about business value, and for business teams to be better able to speak about technical and product details. We believe the highest-performing engineering teams of the future will be incredibly customer-focused, whether it’s internal or external customers. To that end, we look for engineers who treat each other with kindness and respect, and never make others feel like they’re asking a dumb question.

Folks who stand out to us are exceptional communicators who proactively offer to explain things to others, share as much context as possible, and openly discuss their thought process and why they made the decisions they did. This is so important to us that it’s reflected in our interview process, where we opt for presentations and talking through technical challenges rather than whiteboarding. We’ll present real challenges from a customer and look to see how candidates understand and empathize with them.

Empathy is key to Qualia’s culture.

First and foremost, we believe in hiring people who are kind, decent, and respectful. We’re looking for the best engineers to join our team, and we believe the best engineers have high emotional intelligence.

In such a collaborative environment, it’s imperative that Qualia engineers know how to communicate effectively, as well as give and receive constructive feedback. Healthy team dynamics are critical to our success, so how you approach working with others is just as – if not more – important than how you approach a technical problem. Our most successful coworkers are those who share their knowledge and focus on helping the greater team work better together.

At the end of the day, we’re all working towards the same goal – to make it easier for anyone to own a home. It’s often the largest purchase a person will make in their life, and we’ve assembled a team that’s passionate about easing that process. While not everyone at Qualia has necessarily purchased a house of their own, we expect our team members to be able to put themselves in the shoes of our users – whether it’s the consumer buying their first house or the title agent pulling together all the pieces of the closing. We believe technology is the key to restoring healthy homeownership to the United States, and we’re excited to be at the forefront of that change within the real estate industry.