...or you don’t, but you definitely should.
If you’re here, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of us. In case you haven’t: hi, hello, we’re Windscribe, a consumer cybersecurity company and center of moderate meme activity! We’re interested in making life better, safer, and funnier for everybody.
That includes our employees. In the age of COVID and related labour shortages, you might have heard that the tech job market right now is pretty hot. Now more than ever, it’s essential that companies treat their employees well, compensate them fairly, and give them the tools they need to grow and succeed. That’s something we’re extremely interested in. While other companies - even in the tech space - seem determined to treat their employees as expendables, we live life differently. With so many jobs out there, and so many employers doing a terrible, ahem, job at being decent bosses, we know that we need to practice fairness, and espouse endless opportunities to make ourselves stand out.
All of our positions, from senior development to support, offer excellent compensation packages, with comprehensive benefits, free food, opportunities for advancement, and a company culture that allows you to put your fingers in as many professional pies as you like. Or actual pies. We’re not the boss of you (like that). If you’re the kind of person who wants to drill down into the nitty-gritty of your chosen field and really git-gud, we’re here for it. If, conversely, you’re the type who wants to work on code on Monday, process improvements on Tuesday, and write content on Wednesday, we’re here for that, too. People are precious snowflakes. Yeah, I said it. Every single person who works here or could work here has a particular set of skills and we want our employees to be able to use them.
A portrait of the reader.
In short, we know Windscribe is a great place to work. So how do you get here?
If you spend any time at all on /r/cscareerquestions, you’ll know that the current zeitgeist for tech interviews is as follows: fifty-three rounds, seventeen whiteboards, seventy-six Leetcode hard questions, and a slice of your soul.
Okay, that’s not exactly true, but rest assured: our interview process skips a lot of the bullshit that makes the above feel true.
This is roughly what the interview process is here at Windscribe, with some tips thrown in for how to make sure you sail through it:
Most of our employees start by making an application on Angel.co. The ones that stand out tend to be the ones with additional information: why Windscribe, and why you? If you’re a developer, make sure your portfolio (GitHub is fine) is linked, and if you’re applying for another position, try to make sure we can see some of your work in that field. We’ll look through your application and resume, and when we see potential, we’ll get in touch for an initial chat.
This is generally with one of the founders of the company. We give a shit about growing our organization in the best way possible, so upper management has an extremely hands-on role to play in our interview process. We’ll discuss your previous experience and how you plan to apply that experience to Windscribe - standard interview stuff. We’ll also chat about your motivation and ethics. We’re an obsessively ethical and unwaveringly honest bunch. We want you to feel at home here, so we’ll try to determine whether your values and ours more or less match up. This does not mean that we have to agree on everything - we expect and relish contention and healthy confrontation in our day-to-day work. We’d love for you to disagree with one of our stances in an informed and passionate manner.
For development roles, we’ll sometimes assign a short (30 mins-1 hour) take-home assignment to get to know how you approach new problems better, but often, your portfolio will give us all the information we need!
If you do well in the previous stage/s - and we know you will, because you’ve tried hard enough to find this blog article, you sneaky blighter - you’ll be asked back for a second interview, which will usually be focused on the finer points of your day-to-day activities when you start. If, for example, you’re going to be coding, we’ll ask a few questions about code style, cleanliness, and optimization. If you’re going to be offering support to our customer base, we might give you a scenario and ask what you’d do in that scenario. In almost all cases, we’ll chat in a very general sense about networking - what do you understand about the Internet? What’s a VPN? What’s your favourite meme?
We’re not looking for someone who has all the answers. We’re a no-bullshit kind of team who like working with no-bullshit kind of people. We prefer to know that you’re a good communicator, eager to learn and evolve, and easy to work with (the first and the second usually add up to the third). If we see this, we’ll extend an offer. Does this sound like you? Come and check out our open positions at https://angel.co/company/windscribe/jobs.
