Looking for Drupal talent?

If you are, drop us a line.

I know, that's an ambiguous title -- are we looking for Drupal help, or are we offering it? The answer is yes!

We've built 30+ Drupal sites, some small, some big, some e-commerce, some multi-domain, many with integrations to other systems. More than just building sites, we solve problems. We figure out why the Domain Module conflicts with the Fusion theme, when you add support for Color Module. We scrape content from old sites of all kinds, bulk import thousands of pages at a time, set up data synchronization systems, plan deployment strategies, create scaling plans, address performance issues, and more.

All that while paying attention to security, performance, providing user support, and strategic consulting.

And our phone is ringing off the hook! Nine new queries/requests in the past 10 days, and I haven't been able to respond to everybody with our current work load. It's clearly time to add talent.

But there's a problem. I refuse to outsource our work, and I'm reluctant to hire.

Why not outsource?

To put it bluntly, outsourcing your core business is a recipe for disaster. Every company has its own interests at heart, and it's hard to fully align your interests with the interests of a vendor. If I were to outsource development, I would be trying to reduce the cost, while the vendor is looking for ways to increase the cost. That's an underlying tension that's pretty near impossible to eliminate.

That's not a big deal for functions outside your core business. If my janitorial services raises their rates, I can find another and not lose much sleep. If an outsourced developer on a mission critical project disappears, I'm left scrambling to find a replacement.

And not to bash offshore development, but I've heard far more tales of disastrous results of IT projects outsourced to India than I have success stories -- nobody realizes how much of a greater burden on project management there is when you're working overseas, or with virtual teams.

But worse than reliability is quality. We write Drupal modules. We have former employees who are now core developers, and my first core Drupal 7 patch went into the project last weekend. We're programmers first, and have learned the Drupal way of doing things second -- not the other way around. We live and breathe source-code management systems, issue tracking, debugging, and talking to other folks in the community about the new best way of solving a particular problem.

So when we see code from some Indian company who claims to know Drupal, and they've modified core code instead of simply overriding it (which results in a maintenance nightmare), it reinforces my decision to never outsource our core business. And unfortunately, we've had the same experience with local contractors as well -- this isn't a question of location, it's a question of experience.

Why reluctant to hire?

I'm completely convinced that with a small local team who spend much of every week in the same room, we can ensure a much higher quality standard and deliver a much better service. The problem boils down to money.

It turns out that junior people cost more than senior people. Sure, they have a lower hourly rate. But they take a lot more time to train, make more mistakes, take more mentoring, and it takes them longer to do the work. And we're not a big enough company to absorb much of that extra overhead -- so by the time they get reasonably competent and self-directed, they often end up finding a job with substantially higher pay than we can manage for their skills. We either need to drastically increase our rates, work on much bigger projects with much bigger margins, or figure out something else.

And senior people usually require a higher wage to start with -- and at our size, this is not something we can instantly do -- we need to ramp up hours as we sell to fill the new capacity.

Looking for unique individuals

Consider this a job opening. I'm looking for people who love learning something new every single day, who thrive on lots of different challenges, enjoy working on a team, and love seeing people succeed. You need to:

• Be a fast learner, able to figure out things with limited information to start
• Be detail-oriented
• Have good communication skills
• Be self-motivated, organized, able to complete tasks as identified
• Have flexible income needs -- ability to start part-time and grow into a full-time role
• Have an interest in working with other professionals and delivering top quality results
• Enjoy and appreciate startup and small business culture
• Value making the world a better place
• Have some relevant talent or experience related to what we do, and be able to demonstrate it

We're looking for people with the right fit, and a good chance of succeeding in our unique environment. Might be junior or senior, but what we do day-to-day includes these types of activities -- if you have experience with any of the below, it's a big plus in our book:

• Open Source contributions, understanding of open source communities
• Drupal administration and support
• Drupal module development, theming
• PHP programming
• Javascript programming, JQuery, Dojo Toolkit
• Linux System Administration
• git
• Search Engine Optimization and Analysis
• Site Architecture
• Database programming
• E-Commerce programming
• Web services programming
• Agile development/Scrum
• Marketing, training, technical support
• Consulting around open source strategy, whether opening up a product, picking a license, or using an open source project in a proprietary product

What we offer employees

Potentially more than just a job. Seriously. We're looking to build something that resembles more of a boutique co-op of expert professionals at the top of their fields. Because we're just building this, we can't afford to pay a lot right now--but we can give you a piece of the company. The model we're setting up is a mix of The Company We Keep (a book about the South Mountain Company, an employee-owned construction company in Martha's Vinyard) and Monty's Hacking Business Model. I've written about this before.

Of course, there's a long dating period before most people get married, and we're setting up so there's a trial period where either side may easily terminate, no harm, no foul. But if you're a talented freelancer who's tired of having to do all the business stuff in addition to what you love to do, we might be a great fit.

We have a funky old office in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, formerly a store built in 1900. With the original toilet.

We have an employee health-care plan (and have for years).

We have very flexible hours, and lots of flexibility for working remotely part of the time.

We're happy to accommodate unusual work hours, as long as there are times we can all be together as a team.

We have a growing stable of long-term customers, many on monthly support contracts with ongoing needs.

We keep getting a wide variety of fun, interesting, challenging projects.

Laid-back environment, with results-oriented approach.

Sam our chocolate lab is the office greeter, and other dogs are welcome.

Zipcar membership.

Oh yeah, did I say you'll learn a lot? Our goal is to build the business to the point where we can pay above-market wages and have profit-sharing dividends on a regular basis--this is a company made for employees, and we are the shareholders. You'll be a part of helping the company succeed to that point -- and if not, at least you'll learn a lot of valuable skills for your next job.

Our Answer to Outsourcing

Of course, charging for services is what we do, how we make our living. We provide outsourced services. We think we do what we do better than anyone else, aside from our availability. But in spite of it being our bread and butter, we hate the hourly service model. We just don't have a better one... yet.

We are putting more and more emphasis on tasks than time. We measure time, but we also measure task completion, and are currently tracking our completion on all the stuff we do -- because we've put in time into our own processes and systems that often means it takes us far less time to accomplish something than our competition. Our progress reports are task-oriented -- how many tasks did we complete, what were they, and how are we doing on budget?

Just like it costs more to have junior talent than competent, experienced senior talent, we think we cost less than our offshore competition, when it comes to getting your project complete -- we know our platform very, very well and have tools to shorten what might be 45-minute tasks for other developers down to a minute or two.

But regardless of whether we're charging on a time or a task basis, there's an upper limit to what we can earn. And as an entrepreneur, I want to see the potential for some much bigger payoffs for my efforts -- I'm looking for the hockey-stick on the revenue graph, too. And as an open source, free thinker, I don't want to do it through exploitation -- I'm looking for ways of giving back to the commons, not exploit a corner of it for private gain. So in addition to regular services, we're doing a couple of more speculative things:

• Experimenting with revenue-sharing arrangements or equity deals with particular customers
• Developing our own in-house software service products

Nothing aligns interests better than revenue-sharing. If I get rewarded for helping you succeed, we both win, and I've got direct incentive to go above and beyond what I might do if I had a limited budget to work with.

If we think you've got a great project, and a reasonable chance of success, we'd be happy to discuss a revenue-sharing or equity arrangement where we invest time up front for future reward. For the short term, employees working on these projects get the same arrangement -- we currently pay for all the billable work our employees do, but the speculative work gets paid in equity in the company.

Time for me to go back into my cave, finish up a couple projects and respond to all those patient potential customers who've been waiting for a response! If you're interested in working with us, either as a customer or an employee, drop me a line at john at freelock.com, and please give me a week or two to get back to you.