Reverse Interview

Each team uses different technology stacks. For example, the Polaris team uses Puppet for configuration management and Ansible for change management like updates, while Sirius specializes in Ansible and Kubernetes in the OpenShift and Rancher distributions. Many team members wrote and maintain tools written in several programming languages: Python, Go, Bash shell script, and TypeScript are some examples.

Very extensively: we use our own GitLab for our internal projects, where we even store the source Asciidoc files of this handbook. We also have a GitHub account where we share code and tools with the world. We encourage our engineers to open source projects!

We use unit testing as thoroughly as possible, wherever and whenever we can. But we can always do better.

We use Atlassian Jira, and we use it to track everything, including recruiting, accounting, and of course customer support. There is a special page about Jira in this handbook with more information.

Yes. We build, test, and integrate continuously everything we do, exactly the same way we help our customers to do it! We’ve CI/CD pipelines for this handbook, and even for our presentation slides.

Yes.

We use Scrum and Kanban internally. Each Team plans their work separately and following their own processes, but always in an agile and collaborative way. We use Jira extensively to document and keep a trace of everything we do, so that we can work as asynchronously as possible.

No. Every VSHNeer is free to use the tools that work best for them, although some tools become natural "standards" because everyone uses them.

Each of our tools and projects should come with a README and an appropriate setup configuration (for example, Makefile, build.sbt, setup.py, docker-compose.yml) to help you set them up. Usually, there is also additional documentation in the wiki. So, something like git clone && make typically gets you started within minutes.

We’ve a 24x7 on-call team, ready to respond day and night within 30 minutes, and we’re very proactive.

If you get in touch with VSHN you will hear the Word «VSHNary» sooner or later. But what does this mashup of our company name and "visionary" mean? VSHNary is our term to describe a person that fits in our team. It doesn’t mean that you have to be identical to us. It means: To share the same cultural qualities and values, the same fascination for what we’re doing, the same thinking about what’s a team is what makes you VSHNary. To be VSHNary isn’t described in a job description, so you have to come over to feel what it means.

If you want things to change, you are expected to independently act! Which doesn’t mean that you can "just do stuff" without talking to your peers. We’re looking for people which are team players, so a little bit of both attitudes are necessary. We’re looking for people which are open minded and ready to improve things. But also to have the team spirit to work on routine things which just need to be done.

We use a 40 hours work week, including maintenance shifts. We’re also looking for engineers for our on-call rotation, which counts as additional time and is payed in addition to the salary.

We’ve documented this in Your first day at VSHN.

We’re organized using concepts from Sociocracy 3.0 like Domains, Teams and Delegate Circles. Teams use Agile methods like Kanban to plan their work.

We use chat extensively, whereas e-mail is mostly a tool to talk to the "outer world." We also use Zoom to communicate with remote team members, and to record our internal training sessions. You can read more about those tools in the following pages of this handbook: Calendar, Documentation, Jira, and Mail.

It’s okay to have different opinions, and it’s also okay to have differences about them. At the the end there are three ways of solving them:

The teams in consultation with the Project Manager and the Sales teams.

We talk about that in the "Your First Day" and "Weekly Company Meeting" pages of this handbook. Teams organize themselves.

We win as a team and we f*ck up as a team. To handle incidents is a very important topic at our company, and we work hard on avoiding them. If there is an incident we work as a team in fixing it, and don’t let anyone by themselves. After fixing we will discuss in the team what happened, and how to avoid such situations in the future by writing a blame-less postmortem.

We’re humans, and hence we sometimes struggle in our communication. But we’ve strong communication principes we stick to, and we’re constantly trying and evaluating new ways to collaborate and communicate with one another. Some work better than others, but we’re always trying to get better at this.

We’ve a lot of work to do to reach gender parity, and we’re doing it. We give equal opportunities to all candidates, wherever they come from, whatever their background is, and however they see themselves. As long as you adhere to the VSHNeer communication principles, you will be welcome!

Of course! There is an annual budget of 4000 CHF per employee, which can be used for personal education in nearly any way. Certification, language school, conferences, it’s up to you to decide. You can find more information in the "Salary System" and the "Personal Education Process" pages of this handbook.

Yes you should contribute to FOSS projects, No you don’t need special approval for that.

We’re all human and that means we all make mistakes. The best we can do is to learn from these gaps, and most importantly, to never blame somebody else for our own mistakes.

At the moment we’re cooperating with Women++ and the ETHZ, but we’re always looking for new opportunities to improve the state of our community and our industry.

Yes.

Growing.

We don’t have investors; we’re solely owner-based. We grow organically.

We don’t provide bodyleasing and no «traditional» consulting.

Our team.

At the moment there are two part time remote workers that work a few weeks at the time from remote. Homeoffice or remote work isn’t a problem, if you show up here at the VSHN office regurarly, for example 33% of your working hours.

This is explained in detail in the "Your First Day" page in this handbook.

We currently have one large room (12 people) and 5 smaller rooms (with 3–5 people each). Come visit us for a cup of coffee and to have a look.

We believe that you should be payed equally for equal work. We also believe that every VSHNeer works the best they can, so there are no bonus schemes. Salary increases apply to the whole team, and not to a single person. The Salary System page contains more information about this.

We talk about that in detail in the Salary System page of this handbook.

Women get the 14-week maternity leave specified by law, while men get 4-weeks of paternity leave. There are more benefits explained in the Salary System page.