Art+Logic is a continent-wide team of over 50 great developers spread over the US and Canada. From reading the trade magazines, you’d think that there wasn’t any development talent once you got 50 miles outside of the Bay Area, except for a few small pockets of talent in New York City and Boston. That’s a pretty dumb idea. We also disagree with the idea that work is mostly a place you go — it’s a thing you do, and given the right environment, support, and culture, you should be able to do great work from wherever you work best. For most of us at Art+Logic, that workspace is at home, where we can maintain control of noise, distractions, and other factors that can make it difficult to remain productive throughout the work day.

We like to say that we don’t telecommute, because there’s no place for us to telecommute to. If you’ve had bad experiences working remotely in the past because you’ve been left out of what was happening in ‘the office’ — we’re different. The tools, infrastructure, and work practices that we’ve adopted over the years let us work together effectively, efficiently, and very collaboratively without regard to the physical distances between any two of us.

Long, long, ago, we got our start creating desktop applications in C++ for Windows and Macintosh. As things changed in software development, we changed as well, adding web and mobile development capabilities as early as was feasible — one of the iPhone applications available on the opening day of the iOS app store was written by Art+Logic. It also seems obvious now, but we were one of the first companies to put a web server inside a piece of networking equipment for device configuration.

There’s a great opportunity for developers who are intent on staying current and expanding their skills.

Our ideal developers are proficient in many aspects of software development and expert in a few. Because all of our work is custom, we need to be able to flex as a company with the needs of our clients. By focusing on staffing our engineering group with developers who bring both breadth and depth of skills from the entire field of computing, we remain able to propose the best solutions to our clients’ problems, not just the solutions that happen to fit comfortably within the bounds of what we’ve done before.

You’ve probably worked with someone who tries to meet every request with the same response, whether because it’s what they learned a decade ago and they haven’t kept up with the field, or because they’re always looking for excuses to use the latest bit of shiny tech that’s not really ready for use in production. We don’t have room for those developers.

There are plenty of development shops out there that put together beautiful (but essentially static) websites. That’s not our focus; we think of ourselves as software developers, and we’re looking for people with solid capabilities as developers of complex applications, whether those applications are deployed as traditional desktop applications, web applications, mobile applications, or embedded firmware.

We are biased toward doing things that let our people do their best work with a minimum of bureaucratic overhead and ‘process theater’, while retaining the ability to respond quickly to new or changed requirements. Keeping a developer in the project management seat also helps make sure that our development plans are always grounded in reality. Keeping team sizes as small as is reasonable also guarantees that everyone working on a project has a visible role in the success of that project; there’s nowhere to hide.

. . . both with our developers and with our clients. Even though our work is all project based, we prefer to maintain a much longer time horizon than individual projects. It’s common for us to work on multiple projects for a client over many years, and the same is true for our developers (the median tenure of an Art+Logic developer is over 5 years.) We work to keep our developers fresh and engaged by being aware of potential burnout, whether that’s because of working too long with a single language or technology, or because of too many months working on the same project. There are always opportunities to get involved with something new.

You’ve heard things like this before, I know. The weird thing is that we really mean it. We’re a small enough company that each person we hire has the opportunity to have a huge impact on the quality of our service. Instead of looking to fill a certain number of seats with people listing a specific set of buzzwords on their resumes, we’re working to build a portfolio of amazing developers who consistently deliver better-than-expected software to our clients. Each person on our team was the smartest person at their last job.

We’re happy to look at developers’ resumes to get a feel for the variety of experiences that someone has had. However, we’ve found that there’s little correlation between the length of someone’s CV and how they’ll actually perform when a genuinely complex development task is placed in front of them.

This is why every developer who works at Art+Logic had to complete and submit code that completes the Programming Challenge. It’s not a puzzle — we don’t care if you know why manhole covers are round or how many piano tuners there are in Chicago. So far, none of our clients have hired us to solve puzzles.

Instead, the Programming Challenge is a short set of programming tasks that aren’t that different from ones that might be assigned as part of a real project, so you have an opportunity to audition for us under something similar to actual project conditions. Solutions must not only work correctly according to the requirements laid out in the challenge instructions, but the code itself needs to be impressive enough to the developer reviewing it that she recommends moving you forward in the process.

Typically, companies wait until they have an urgent need to hire someone, then place an ad, interview a few people from the stack of applications that arrive, and hope to hire the best candidate that is identified by that process, keeping their fingers crossed that this person will be able to put out whatever fire caused the urgent hire in the first place.

We don’t do that.

We’re always looking for great developers, whether we have an immediate place for them or not. Our recruiting process runs continuously in the background, identifying people we’d like to work with as soon as an appropriate opportunity surfaces. When the rate of new projects starting exceeds the rate of existing projects being completed, we reach out to that group of already vetted developers, looking for the best match of skills, availability, and likelihood of long-term success at Art+Logic.