Culture

My guiltiest pleasure right now is watching apocalypse films. It’s less escapism than it is catharsis, and there’s usually a happy ending (or at the very least---they have an ending). When you watch these apocalyptic movies, the audience is always focused on the hero, holding the door closed against some encroaching danger. Few people are paying attention to the guy in the corner of the room sitting with others, telling some wild story or caught in the middle of some elaborate joke, trying to get a smile out of people in crisis.

Welcome, New Roacher! That’s how all of our Welcome Documents start, though you can expect yours to start with your name on top. Welcome Docs are how we help our new teammates get started and get past the natural new job jitters at Cockroach Labs. We understand there’s nothing worse than not knowing what to do or where to go on your first day, so we use Welcome Docs as a nice roadmap for this transition. In a previous blog about onboarding, I share how we structure Your First Weeks at Cockroach. We designed our onboarding process to be robust and informative, covering information about best practices at Cockroach Labs and providing an overview of our product, CockroachDB. However, it doesn’t account for the various nuances of each role, team, or department. That’s why our People team makes an effort to create personalized Welcome Docs to account for those specific role differences. In a partnership with hiring managers, we build the docs to make sure there’s clarity in what’s expected of you in your first 90 days. Here’s a bit more on what they look like:

Working at a startup presents a number of challenges for hiring. You have limited resources, you’re lesser-known to those outside of your industry, and you innovate at breakneck speed, making it difficult to articulate what you do. In an industry where candidates are inundated with information, cutting through the noise requires new, ever-evolving strategy.

For many people, interactions in the workplace and connections between coworkers are deeply important to overall wellbeing. We learned in the early days of Cockroach Labs that expressing gratitude and praise for the good work of our peers was deeply important to our culture, and that there existed a desire to acknowledge and appreciate each other publicly. This developed into what we call “peer acks”, short for peer acknowledgments, a forum for celebrating the good work of our peers.

Jessica Edwards

Nov 27, 2019

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.

Throughout the year, we offer internships at Cockroach Labs to give students opportunities to gain industry experience and work on challenging problems within distributed systems. Bilal Akhtar is a Member of Technical Staff at Cockroach Labs, working on the Core Storage team and toying with KV storage engines. Outside of work, you’ll see him reading non-fiction, or giving urban photography a shot.

Learning is Good is a program at Cockroach Labs that provides a stipend for employees to take advantage of resources for their professional development. Employees are encouraged to take courses, participate in workshops, attend conferences or obtain relevant certifications.

For new employees, starting at a new company isn't always a comfortable transition. Even if they’re excited about their new role, day 1 at a new office can be scary. They’ve left the familiar feeling of their old position for the unknown situation of a new company. Onboarding is meant to answer some of these unknowns. While the HR team can sit you down and walk through how the company came to be and when you’ll be paid, there’s some amount of onboarding where a meeting with HR doesn’t cut it. At Cockroach Labs, we’ve made onboarding a team sport. New hires are paired with a Roachmate -- their go-to resource -- with many other Roachers helping to get new hires up to speed on our product and how things work. The process is organized by our People Ops team, but with lots of help from every department at Cockroach Labs. We also refer to our onboarding process as MOLTing. Of course, we're a company called Cockroach Labs, and if you didn't already know, cockroaches molt. It's a process they go through early on in their lifecycle to shed their skin and build that resilient outer shell for which they're known. This reflects our onboarding program in that we hope you learn useful things during the start of your time here to become a resilient Roacher.

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