There are changes about at Giant Swarm and one of these is the fact that we are moving offices again. Interestingly the reason is not that we are adding three people, but that we are moving to a smaller office. Being a remote first company, we just don’t need such a big office.
So on the same day that three new colleagues start, we are moving three floors down. I am carrying tables again… whoever wanted the automatic height adjusting standing desks gets my vote for ass-of-the-day BTW. Carry your own damn desk! :)
But back to the five Ts, which is not meant as a wonderful new management mantra (sorry :)) but was a good title. As all the people we hired in 2018 up till now have their first name starting with T.
Having actually started a few months back on a very part-time basis, Thea has started working almost full time from January, taking care of creating a bit of organisation around our chaotic bunch (thank you for an amazing onsite in Winterberg!) and for making sure this thing does not fall apart. She is highly competitive, so when you play a game with her, you either lose or beware her bad mood. Your choice.
Also last month, our resident Finn, Tuomas, joined as a Platform Engineer and we already had the pleasure of wonderful chats around diverse things like Kubernetes (duh!), precision rifles and OBD ports in cars. He has come to us from Codemate where he was an Architect and already has a good amount of experience with Kubernetes.
Then we have Tobias, who is starting his internship here and then maybe staying on as a working student. I still remember his email about whether we are looking for interns. I said that we only do it in special cases as onboarding people correctly is a lot of work. So he should write me an email with his thoughts about Kubernetes and why he wanted to work at Giant Swarm. I have seldom read a better email on the subject from an applicant. I couldn’t ignore him. Welcome Tobias.
Theo is another Platform Engineer, this time coming to us from Erento, where he was modernising their entire stack, working with Kubernetes, Docker, Go and Microservices in general. This is an obvious fit in and of itself and I will have to make sure to get an explanation of Go - the game, not the programming language - from him on the next onsite. Theo is French but lives in Leipzig, where he can decide if he wants to drive quickly to Berlin to hang with our Russian Roman, or take the long road to Belgium to talk French with our Belge Julien. Ok, hangouts are an option too ;).
Last but not least, the next one is strange, on so many levels. First of all, Tommy is not a Developer but a Social Media / Content / SEO / Marketing guy. It’s very rare that we hire somebody without a development background. On top of that, he is actually living near our headquarters here in Germany. Most of our other hires live hundreds of kilometres away. To make matters worse, he actually moved here… from the United States, admittedly not for us for but his wife, very likely a better reason. Looking forward to a bit of American marketing vibe here. Watch out for new Patent Pending Blockchain AI Microservices Open Source Application Container APIs from Giant Swarm soon.
What next… I don’t know. Only hiring Ts? They say you need to hire T shaped people (Hint: Specialists in one field but broad knowledge in general) but I have the slight feeling that is not what those consultants meant. I am not that good at figuring out what consultants really mean though, so I might be mistaken.
Thank you to all Ts that have joined the Swarm in two thousand eightTeen. Let’s make developers happy together.
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