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Socialtext is hiring a tester/QA person

The job announcement should show up here any minute. In the meantime, you can read the job description.

This is a great job, and we're looking for one outstanding person. You can google for Socialtext yourself (I recommend doing some research before you apply), and read the official job description. Here I'm going to talk about why this is such a great job, and the stuff you need to have to get it that isn't in the job description.

Socialtext has about fifty employees. A few are based in Palo Alto, but the development, QA, and support staff are spread across the US and Canada, along with a few overseas employees. If hired, you would be expected to telecommute. If you happen to live in the Bay Area, you'd be welcome to visit the office.

We're a small-a agile shop. We have standups, retrospectives, and iterations. We release small features frequently, and we install them on our internal wiki before we release to production.

Besides the wiki, we use irc, email, VOIP, VNC, and more, to communicate and share information. We're in constant contact with each other through the day.

Since so much of our communication is with text, excellent writing skills are critical. Since there are so few employees, abilities beyond testing are very important. If you know about business, or development, or marketing, or Open Source, that's important to us. You can have a real influence on how the company works.

We have some interesting company policies. For instance, the official vacation policy consists of five words: "Be An Adult About It". We have three salaries. Everyone who joins gets paid one of the three salaries. Everyone in the company (usually) has a quarterly travel budget. When you join, you get an allowance to buy yourself hardware. Most people have Mac laptops, but we have a couple of Windows users and a couple of Linux users.

A lot of our development work is done in public. Surf http://www.socialtext.net/open to see what we're up to. The coolest thing I have over there is three small tutorials for how to use our REST API with a Ruby client.

We have a lot of very smart people who hold strong opinions. We use strong language, because we don't have the bandwidth to play politics. We criticize ideas, not people, we work on fixing code, not fixing blame. Discussions get heated, but aren't personal. If you're offended by four-letter words in the service of making a point, this is not the place for you to work.

Besides unit tests, we have an automation framework based on Selenium. We've quadrupled the number of test steps since April, from about 1000 to about 4000. I'm using Watir and FireWatir to do basic analysis of page load times. If you know test automation, Selenium, or performance testing, you'd be very welcome. Performance in particular is just coming under close scrutiny. In the next six months we are planning to make significant improvements to all of our test architecture. It promises to be a really cool project.

We have about 10 developers. When we add another QA person, we'll have a pretty good dev/test ratio.

This is a great job with great people and a very interesting market.

If you'd like to apply, send your resume as text in the body of an email addressed to jobs@socialtext.com. You can send it to me, too.