Job Requirements

To anyone approaching me with a job opportunity, here’s a list of requirements for me to consider it. If you think you can match / negotiate appropriately with these, feel free to reach out.

Product / Project 📦

  • Ethical
  • Interesting
  • Beneficial to society not just to line the pockets of shareholders

Ultimately what keeps me in a job is the product. If it’s not interesting, I’m not motivated. I have no interest in agency or ecommerce work.

I love what I do right now, I work on a cool product in the trust and safety team. Previously I’ve worked on stuff that’s been used by [redacted], [redacted] and even [■■■■■■]!

Team 👥

  • Diverse
  • Mix of experience / skill levels
  • Cross-discipline (back-end, front-end, QA, product, design all working together)

I have my areas of expertise and interest. I like learning from others with different skills and experiences.

Salary & Benefits 💷

  • Salary of at least £110,000/year
  • Pension contributions beyond the UK legal minimum
  • Bonus scheme for meeting targets / goals
  • Equity as an option
  • Private healthcare & dental with spouse / family coverage

It’s not all about money, but without other amazing benefits, taking a downgrade in pay or the like isn’t likely to get me into a role.

Working Hours 🕖

  • 35 a week (potentially willing to work 40 for the right pay & benefits, or drop to 4 days per week for the right arrangement)
  • Flexible. I like to work 9-5 or 8-4 with a 1 hour lunch break, or 8-5 with a 2 hour lunchbreak that gives me time to feed and walk the dog, as well as have my own lunch and relax for a little bit. Ultimately, if I need an hour off for an appointment, I’ll gladly make up the time, allow me flexibility
  • No time tracking

Time tracking leads to trust issues. If you don’t trust me to do the job I’m hired to do (lines of code written or hours sat in a chair, these are not measurement metrics for success), then I can’t trust that you aren’t number-watching as a (terrible) metric for output.

Time Off / Holiday Allowance 🌴

  • 28 days a year or more (plus bank holidays)

I currently have unlimited PTO (and yes, I use it)

Location 🌍

  • 100% Remote (or with quarterly company / team meetups that include paid travel & accommodation if required)
  • Timezone is less of an issue (I’ve worked with people in the US from East to West coast) - but having to work completely to another timezone isn’t ideal. Occasionally is fine

Offices (especially open-plan) are detrimental to productivity. Noise and distractions mean that while 8 hours is spent in the building, only 3-4 hours work ever really get done and the rest is padded out.

At home I have my own space. I can focus and set my own contact boundaries, listen to my own music, and set my own temperature.

I’ve worked in remote, distributed teams for almost 5 years without issue and we’ve built products that are incredibly well received. Being in an office wouldn’t have improved that.

Tech 💻

  • Mostly don’t care, as long as it’s not chasing the new-shiny just because it’s new-shiny
  • I’m most experienced with PHP and related technologies
  • I have no interest in front-end work (there are far more talented and motivated people than me for that)
  • Must care about quality and stability (static analysis, good tests, good practices, agreed upon standards with tooling to enforce that)

While it’s not the most glamorous thing, I’ve run projects handling large amounts of traffic with essentially a LAMP-stack. It’s tried & tested.

I prefer stability over cutting-edge. Without getting stagnant that is.

Extras ✅

  • Freedom and support to travel to give talks/workshops/sessions at conferences

As you can see from my talks page, I’ve given a lot of talks in a lot of places. Any company I work for would need to support that (in time off to travel and deliver a talk - I’m representing the company and it’s values and I do so in a professional and respectable manner)

Oh, and as an aside: me being entitled to the legal minimum amount of holidays isn’t a ‘perk’, you contributing the legal minimum to my pension isn’t a ‘perk’ - please don’t act like these are anything other than your legal requirement to offer.