Rustici Software is always looking for great talent. We're currently hiring software developers, the job description below will give you a feel for what it is like to work here.

Software Architect

My name is Tim Martin, I own this company with one other person, Mike Rustici.

You want to work here. If you're a great developer, you really want to work here.

We value life outside of the office. People who work here don't work more than 40 hour weeks. Seriously, we don't let them. We don't have a vacation policy. If you are the kind of person for whom we have to count vacation days, you're not the right person. Take care of your work, take time off and live your life. I have no idea how many days off any of our employees took last year. Because they get their work done and done well, I just don't care.

You want to work here. I wear a t-shirt to work everyday. Mike wears a collar, but we make fun of him for it. I play ping pong everyday because the title of "King of the Table" is important. I care about our office assistant's bird Ripley because she cares about it.

You want to work here, because you're good. We often dole out projects with a 10 minute conversation and a month to make it go. Show us that you're good, and we'll trust you to decide how something should work and when you're going to do it. If you are uncomfortable learning new things and working through stuff yourself, you probably don't want to work here. We want depth of development skill, but the particular language is not crucial. Depth in Java or .NET would be a good place to start and experience with the LAMP stack might come in handy. We're not hung up on a particular amount of experience, but we are adamant about a particular level of skill.

You want to work here, because we're good. Check us out at www.scorm.com... we're a small company with big time clients and potential to match. You've probably never heard of us and you've probably never worked with us, but the people who have hold us in the highest esteem. If you're going to apply, make sure you know what we do. We are at the very center of the e-learning industry and we're about to start an ambitious project we feel could revolutionize the industry. It is only at the whiteboard stage right now so we are looking for people who can both maintain our existing product line as well as drive this new venture forward.

One of the first things we'll have you do in the selection process is complete a small programming test. If you'd care to submit it with your initial application, it certainly won't hurt. This is just a simple example of a small portion of the work that we do. We have intentionally kept it simple in an effort to value your time. But we can tell a lot from your response. Consider it carefully. You can download the test from http://www.scorm.com/employment/EmployeeTest.zip. Look at the comments of the HTML file for directions on how to proceed.

We'll want to hear your thoughts on the current state of the web and where you see it heading. What are the most significant trends? What technologies are going to change how we create software? What sites are breaking new ground? Specifically, we'd like to hear your opinion on Amazon's S3 and EC2. Do they change the game? If so, what impacts do they have on system architectures? We don't expect you to submit an essay, but come prepared to present an informed opinion and have an intelligent discussion on the topics.

Mike and I are both former developers who didn't like working for people who didn't value our work. We won't forget that. We also didn't like working with people who couldn't keep up. Each time we hire, we wait until we find exactly the right person. If that's you, we really hope you'll send your resume over to us with an email. Make sure that what we get from you makes it painfully apparent that you are the right person. Make sure that you make it clear in your email or resume or whatever, that this job is important to you, that you want to work here, not just somewhere. Obviously we're not looking for placement agencies with a request like this.