Culture

Built In today announced that Cockroach Labs won in six categories on its 2023 Best Places To Work Awards. We were recognized on all of the lists we were eligible and nominated for including: - New York City Best Midsize Places to Work - New York City Best Places to Work - San Francisco Best Midsize Places to Work - San Francisco Best Places to Work - U.S. Best Midsize Places to Work - U.S. Best Places to Work

Lindsay Grenawalt

Jan 11, 2023

At Cockroach Labs, we value not only our company’s collective culture, but sharing a view into the culture driving teams across the company. In the Meet the Team series, you’ll meet wonderful Roachers who help Enable Every Developer to Build World-Changing Applications. This entry is part two in our feature of the East Sales team, where we sat down with Matt Vaughn, Brad Lewis, and Anthony DiMaggio. See part one to meet Vincent Giacomazza, VP of East Sales.

At Cockroach Labs, we value not only our company’s collective culture, but sharing a view into the culture driving teams across the company. In the Meet the Team series, you’ll meet wonderful Roachers who help Enable Every Developer to Build World-Changing Applications. This entry is part one in our feature of the East Sales team, where we sat down with Vincent Giacomazza, Vice President of Sales, East.

During my first week at Cockroach Labs, our company held its annual Roacherness Awards, a ceremony to recognize and celebrate Roachers who embody our values. I was pleasantly surprised when my colleague Chelsea received an award for our value ‘Establishing Balance,’ celebrating the boundaries she sets between her work and home life through using benefits like our flexible Paid Time off policy to explore the world. This being my second job out of college, I was shocked. My experience post-college was one in which companies asked me to dive into my work with cult-like abandon, to define myself by the goals of the company first, and to let who I am come second.

G’day! I’m Oliver, a Member of Technical Staff here at Cockroach Labs. After spending the better part of 5 years in the United States, I decided to come back home to Sydney, Australia. With my homecoming, I’m happy to announce that Cockroach Labs is hiring people to work with us from Sydney, Australia! If you’re curious about me, my journey, and why I’m at Cockroach, read on. Of course, if the news of an opening sounds good, you can jump straight to the job openings we have in Sydney.

Companies like Cockroach Labs are first and foremost groups of people; people with passions and drives that go beyond what they do for work. This is, by and large, what drives organizations to consider how to best enable their staff to make an impact on their communities through volunteerism, donations, and action. As a company, we have emphasized doing good in our corporate giving initiatives: we match referral bonuses with an equivalent donation to a 501(c)(3) charity of our staff’s choice, run marketing campaigns geared towards amassing donations to groups such as Women Who Code and Black Girls Code, and establish an employee-led committee each year to decide where to donate a significant corporate gift. Still, many of our people have other ways of giving back. To give Roachers the time and space they need to be forces of good, we’ve established Connect and Contribute Days: company time dedicated for our people to learn, seek understanding, grow, volunteer, mobilize, or otherwise make a positive change.

Today marks the 99th anniversary of the birth of Edgar F. Codd, the author of “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks” and godfather of the relational database. Ted Codd did for the database what Xerox PARC did for personal computers: made them accessible to everyday humans. Long before the invention of computers, there were databases. As early as 2400 BC the ancient Sumerians were carving tablets recording medical prescriptions for different ailments. Lists of Roman citizens on parchment scrolls. Card catalogs. Rolodexes. Even after computers were invented, data was far from automated. Early database models used a “flat file” system – a simple consecutive list of records that required the computer to begin at the start of the list and search sequentially. A very slow way to search, add to, and maintain large volumes of records. Meanwhile, we had a moon to get to! Humanity needed a way to access and interact with data in a fast, efficient, and accurate way.

Michelle Gienow

Augt 19, 2020

David Delaney is a Recruiter at Cockroach Labs. During office hours you'll find Dave interviewing and reaching out to engineers or thinking about how to improve the candidate experience. Outside of work most of his time is dedicated to his wife Rachel and son Ezra, but he does find time on Sundays to run around a bit in his old guys soccer league.

Interviewing at Cockroach Labs comes with a twist. The interviewing process is unconventional by design—especially for non-engineering positions. The interviews are exercise-based, focused on practical, day-in-the-life style work tasks. Additionally, resumes are removed from the process to fight unconscious bias. The process is crafted thoughtfully and customized for each role being hired for, but it can be a bit daunting for candidates who are used to traditional interviews. As someone who recently experienced the process first-hand, I thought it would be beneficial for potential candidates to hear about my interviewing experience and gain insight into the process. For a little context, I joined Cockroach Labs in July as the new Technical Writer. In this post, I’ll be looking at the interviews from the perspective of a tech writer, but the process applies to all open roles across the company. The typical technical writer hiring process goes something like this: You apply for an online job posting with your resume and work samples. The HR representative conducts a phone interview. If selected, you are called for an in-person interview. The in-person interview generally entails a writing (read: grammar) exercise, followed by routine questions. The interview is usually conducted by two or three tech writers and the hiring manager. In my experience, the typical interview process relies on the candidate telling the hiring team what they can do, rather than showing what they can do. This does not necessarily translate into the candidate being a good fit for the position and the team. By contrast, the interview process at Cockroach Labs is cross-functional and exercise-based, which is unconventional, yet effective in the sense it not only helps the company decide if the candidate is a good match for the position, but also helps the candidate evaluate if the company is a good fit for them.

Amruta Ranade

July 11, 2019