The Frontier Group is a boutique software development company based in West Perth. We have a strong focus on web software, and utilise Ruby on Rails.

Our development team has recently grown to eight staff and we’re looking to take on our first full time designer. Until now we’ve worked with design freelancers and subcontractors. Now we want to make a designer part of our team, allowing our developers to work closely with the interface expert. We need someone who’s part of our team and not just kicking the ball in the same direction.

Is this you?

We don’t micro-manage and we trust your design ability, so you’ll need to have a track record of delivering completed designs. You’ll have a few years commercial experience, probably working in a creative studio doing great but under-appreciated work.

This is your opportunity to jump-ship and drive the creative direction of a young, vibrant and passionate company.

You’ll care about pixel-perfect alignment, and will take pride in the quality of the HTML you use to reflect those designs. You’ll know how JavaScript can be used to enhance the web. You might even care about SASS and HAML, if you’re really cool.

You’ll keep up to date with current trends and care about using modern techniques and practices, as well as tools and technologies.

Your workload will be approximately broken down into:

• 50% web application
• 25% web site
• 25% other design

The other design component will include things like fashion (t-shirt design), art work and even interior design… anything colourful or creative that’s happening in our world will be your responsibility.

Using the right tools is important and we realise that. We don’t have a parent company dictating how we do things or what our “standard operating environment” is – you’ll get to make those decisions with us. We all use MacBook Pros for development, but you might want a new iMac, for example.

What we give you

• $76k per year salary
• 9% superannuation (on top of salary)
• $1k travel allowance per year (parking, bike servicing, public transport)
• Internet and mobile allowance ($80 each per month)
• Opportunities to work from home/flexi-time
• Private office (when we move to the new location mid-year, if preferred)
• Pay reviews every 6 months with no ceiling on earning potential

What you give us

• 38 hours per week
• Your creative genius

How to apply

Send an email to jobs@thefrontiergroup.com.au linking to your online portfolio. Please be clear how much of the design you are responsible for, or if it was a collaborative process with other creative types.

Prepare a list of four sites – two that have elements you like, and two that have elements you dislike. A critique of these, either in person or via the phone, will be part of the second round of interviews.

We’re going through a massive growth phase at the moment, which has seen us double our staff in the last few months. This spurt has been driven by our customers wanting more Frontiersmen to work on their projects. It’s a good problem to have, but it has also exposed a series of considerations.

Our growth until now has been very controlled and organic, in that we have always been reacting to our business’ needs. We have taken on development staff one at a time. This resulted in our team being stretched for a little while before we take on a new hire. For example, when we moved from two directors (and took on Mark, our first employee) it was because Adam and I were working at 150% capacity. When Mark joined us, and we could spread that 300% over three people. As we get bigger, the extra capacity a single person can supply is reduced, relative to the total capacity of the company. This is great because it means we don’t get pushed to 150% anymore, but also means we need to start taking on multiple hires at once.

Late last year we had James and Dan join us, and we’ve just wrapped up our interview process and have hired John, Jacques and Jordan. We’ve gone from five developers to seven, to ten.

Now we’re looking for a full-time designer too, to join our team and balance our logic and structure with creativity and colour.

This raises the following ethical consideration: is it OK to actively head-hunt staff from other organisations? What if they’re your competitors? What if they’re you competitors, but you’re part of a social community? I think there’s two main schools of thought.

Firstly, there’s the attitude that we live in a capitalist world where the dollar rules and everyone’s looking out for themselves. If you can offer better employment opportunities than your competitor, then that’s your commercial advantage. If The Frontier Group is able to offer a larger salary and greater career prospects than our competitors, it’s to our benefit. Is it unethical for us to leverage that advantage?

Counter-balancing that argument, I feel, is the idea that the relationship between a company and their employees is comparable to human romantic relationships. If the pretty girl at the bar has a ring on her finger, it’s not considered appropriate to hit on her. Do you thing that translates?

Are “married” (employed) staff off-limits, or is it a case of “all’s fair in love and war (and HR)”?

Earlier today I put the call out to a bunch of students indicating that there’s employment opportunities at The Frontier Group. Here’s what I said:

To quote Joel Spolsky, we’re looking for people who are “smart and get things done”.

The Frontier Group is a boutique software company based in West Perth with a strong focus on web application development. We work with Ruby (and Rails), PHP, relational databases, VMware and Linux. We work in small, specialist teams. We’re a young company – our staff are all in their late 20s. Our interview process is a 10 minute casual chat over coffee, with a full day of (paid) pair-programming. If you like us and we like you, you’re hired.

We understand that you’re a student and will work to accommodate your schedule. We’re expecting about 10 hours per week, as an indicator. If you’ve got exams and can’t work, that’s cool. If you want more work, that’s cool too. We get it.

We are affiliated with Sun Microsystems and IBM. We use Sun server hardware and Apple notebooks. We’re members of AWIA. We host and sponsor the Ruby and Rails Oceania Meetup each month. We’ve got our own rack space in the city.

We use a converted apartment as an office and have a t-shirt and jeans dress code. Come check it out some time.

The positions are entry level part-time/contract with a view to full time upon graduation.

Email jobs@thefrontiergroup.com.au if you’d like more information, or to arrange the chat.

Within a few minutes I started receiving enquiries, so I thought it would be worthwhile elaborating on our interview process and expectations.

Here’s what I told one potential applicant:

We’re focussing on Ruby and Rails development for new projects, but have a lot of legacy PHP code that we’ve inherited or developed over the years. Both languages are readily available and I’m recommending applicants familiarise themselves with them. There’s heaps of Ruby and Rails resources online – I recommend Railscasts and the RailsEnvy/Ruby5 podcasts. The PHP documentation (at php.net) is awesome too – we use it daily.

Obviously we don’t expect you to become a Ruby or PHP rockstar over night – as I stressed in my initial email, we’re looking for someone who’s “smart and gets things done.” However, we do need to look for people that are able to actually do the work we require. If you’re smart and can get things done, learning Ruby and/or PHP to a level that you’re useful to us is not going to be hard.

The interview process is a 10-15 minute chat where we present a problem and bounce ideas around on how you’d solve it. You’ll work as part of the team. It’ll be a question like “what are the considerations when designing and implementing an online shopping cart?” You won’t write code, but will have a whiteboard if you want to draw diagrams to help explain things. A knowledge of plugins, tools and the Ruby gems available to you will help a lot here. For example, ActiveMerchant is a really popular gem for interfacing with credit card processing systems, and mentioning it during the chat would show us you have a finger on the pulse.

We usually know if we’re going to mesh with a potential employee or not within the first few minutes, so why drag out an interview over an awkward hour? All that first encounter is about, for me, is making sure they’re the kind of person I could get along with, and trust to get the job done. I’m not looking for someone who’s a cookie-cutter generic, but rather someone with personality and confidence as well as general intelligence and technical ability.

It’s during the day of pair-programming that we get to road-test you, and you get to road-test us. If we work well together, then you’re offered a job. We don’t pair-program all the time at The Frontier Group, but it’s a technique that we use with good results on suitable projects. Sometimes you drive and sometimes you’re the wingman.

This is the part of the interview process where you get to show us your technical skills, as well as how you operate as a team member. I don’t think there’s much value in intimidating someone with “solve this problem in C on the whiteboard in 5 minutes” during a formal interview. When was the last time you ever wrote real code on a whiteboard anyway?

Lastly, I love asking people if they collaborated on an assignment at uni. It normally catches people off guard, but their answer can be really insightful and gives a good indication to their personality. Some people will deny they ever cheated, whilst others will claim that they let their friends copy off them. Some will tell you that they worked on all their assignments with their friends, even when they weren’t group assessments. Here’s a tip: in the real world I want to work with people that have experience working in a team, using each other’s skills and abilities, so if you did get together with all your uni friends, work on an assignment as a group and then spend the last hour changing your variable names and obfuscating your code so it looked unique, it might not be something to hide.

How is our recruitment process similar or different to your organisations?

There is a scheduled network outage planned for this Sunday which will affect all customers:

Outage Details
Sunday 24th May 2009

Outage Window
7:00am – 11:00am

Actual Outage
7:30am – 8:00am