When hiring for a developer position at an interactive marketing agency, finding someone with the technical chops is only half the battle. The developer also needs to thrive in the
agency environment, which can be very different from a traditional software development shop.
Most people think of programmers as brainy geeks toiling away at
Microsoft or
Google, cranking out impossibly complex code on a steady diet of stale pizza and Red Bull. Or maybe they imagine cool guys in turtlenecks at
Apple or some social media company like
Facebook, calmly making the final tweaks to the most elegantly simple site you’ve ever seen, espresso in hand. We have those same types of developers at Springbox. The difference is the kind of work we do. And the pizza is fresher.
Software developers at places like Google and Apple work on projects that typically last for months or, in the case of Microsoft, years. If you dropped in on the team working on the next version of Windows, or Safari or Gmail, you’d likely see dozens or hundreds of programmers, all on essentially the same project. They make software, be it in a shrink-wrapped box or on a website, that is big, feature-rich, and when it changes you hear about it on the news. It is technically complex, taking rooms full of diagrams and thick books of documentation to truly understand how to fix or upgrade it.
At an agency, the programmers tend to call themselves web developers or web designers. The projects are much smaller, much shorter, and typically a lot less technically complex – but no less important. We do something quickly that solves an immediate need, and doesn’t try to do a ton of other stuff at the same time. At Springbox, our projects have a focus on marketing, meaning that our work is very much client-focused. The users are going to see it first-hand so it needs to be visually appealing. It may not be super-complex, but it needs to have a great user experience and it needs to help the client get the word out, right now, about their product or service.
If you come to work at Springbox, you’ll work on ten projects at once, for different clients. Each one may last a day, a week, or a month, but rarely longer than that. You’ll work on simple microsites, styling a couple of pages to match the client’s product, or you’ll work on an email to convey the excitement of a product launch, in all browsers and on your phone. You’ll build Facebook, MySpace and Twitter pages for Fortune 500 companies, or you’ll help get the information from three different places into the new site that the client wants to be able to update hourly. It’s fast, it changes a lot and it’s stuff you get to see right away.
If that sounds like fun, call us.
We’re hiring.