Culture

Welcoming a child while working at a tech startup can seem like an overwhelming life change. In a world where everyone is already strapped for time, you’re going to take three months away from your role!? It sounds scary, but at Cockroach Labs, we’re working on ways to make this stressful time easier, and I’m excited to share more about our programs for Roachers who are starting or growing their families. For starters, if you think the technology industry is just startups full of recent college graduates, think again! At Cockroach, our average employee is 36 years old. 30% of our team has children, and we average 2 children per family with more Little Roachers on the way!

Cockroach Labs was named for resilience and survival. The last year has tested us all in unimaginable ways, and it was the strength and resilience of our team and our community that kept us afloat and propelled us forward. So it is an absolute honor that, after the year we’ve all had, we have been named to Inc. Magazine’s annual list of the Best Workplaces for 2021.

Lindsay Grenawalt

May 12, 2021

At Cockroach Labs, we’ve long worked at reducing bias for better, more inclusive recruiting outcomes. We do this by removing resumes throughout the hiring process so that interviewers can focus on you, the candidate— not your background. We also emphasize exercise-based interviews that give people the opportunity to demonstrate that they can do the job instead of recounting past experience. These practices are rooted in a basic, human principle for hiring: as a company looking for amazing talent, we want to eliminate hurdles that might keep you from showing us your strengths in an interview, not create them. Four years ago, we saw another opportunity to help people put their best foot forward: we decided to make our interview prep materials openly available.

Last year, I changed careers from Tech Writing to Developer Relations at Cockroach Labs. This blog post details how an investment in employees' careers and development, as well as the Roachermobile programs at Cockroach Labs helped me reinvent my career.

Amruta Ranade

May 3, 2021

Cockroach Labs was recently named on both Crain’s and Built in NYC’s “Best Places to Work” lists. In the published blurbs, they talk about the way our team treats employees: from the really important perks like great healthcare to the smaller ones like office snacks and Citibike memberships. I think what these lists are missing, however, is a greater sense of how Cockroach Labs views its relationship to the humans we interact with: our employees, our customers, and the world at large. One of the many ways this is manifested is in our company’s corporate giving initiatives. Here are some of the charitable giving practices we’ve instituted, and how they contribute to making Cockroach Labs a great place to work.

Titanic is a 1997 Oscar-winning film starring Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (who will from now on be referred to as K8 Winslet) in a love story aboard the ill-fated Titanic ship. As we know, the Titanic was an “unsinkable ship” - the largest ship in the world at that time - yet it sank mere days into its maiden voyage, costing the lives of 1500 people on board when it hit an iceberg and sunk to the bottom of the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912. I want to reimagine the ending of the Titanic, both the ship’s ending and the film’s. We’re going to look at the story through the lens of Kubernetes and distributed database technology to see how the story could have ended happily.

This past summer, we launched the Infinite Colors employee resource group, or CREWS (Cockroach Employees Who Support), at Cockroach Labs. What is Infinite Colors? Infinite Colors is an employee-driven initiative to raise awareness and share resources about the challenges and opportunities of neurodiversity in the workplace.

In summer 2019, the Infinite Colors employee resource group, or CREWS (Cockroach Employees Who Support), was launched at Cockroach Labs. It is an employee-driven initiative, and its mission statement is to raise awareness and share resources about the challenges and opportunities of neurodiversity in the workplace.

When building out our internship program at Cockroach Labs, we wanted to be intentional about how we would support up-and-coming developers, bring in fresh ideas, and create a funnel of amazing new grads to Cockroach Labs. It’s been five years since we hosted our first interns at our headquarters in New York. As the company has grown, so has our engineering internship program. Our general philosophy around interns may be different from other technology companies: we assign real work that applies to the next releases of CockroachDB and CockroachDB Dedicated. Our interns understand that their work affects our company’s roadmap, gain a sense of what working at Cockroach is like, and build relationships with engineers on their team and leadership members.