We will have candidates come in and right off the bat say, “I’m so excited to get this interview. Everybody knows how hard it is to get into First Factory.”
Honestly believe people are mimicking us now. When we first got there I’d ask how our place was different. The answers were crazy. A lot of places made employees hand cell phones in when they got to work. They were told they can’t be on the internet. Granted, this was years ago, but still, you need to hit the internet. At certain companies, if you hit the internet they would lock you down. We just aren’t, and will never be, that type of company.
We were some of the first to trust our developers.
I modeled a lot of what I did based on Joel Spolsky. He knows how to treat software developers. He had a lot of opinions that I agreed with and that we mimicked in Costa Rica. I built this company based on what he taught and it has been very successful.