hiring Archives — Stampede: the strategic design & technology company

We Are Hiring

Shaza Hakim — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:34:14 +0000

Stampede is looking for two PHP programmers to join our team.

The Mojo

Fresh, bright personalities, fast learner with great attitude and productive under minimal supervision. 1 year employment or freelancing experience as programmer required. WordPress and Joomla skills preferred.

Our client list spans 4 continents and we’re getting busier every day. Do expect to hit the ground running – we have plenty of interesting work. You can work remotely too.

As you can see, our requirements are pretty loose. That’s because we know great people when we see them. Call it good vibes, witchcraft. Wonderful attracts.

Write to jobs@stampede-design.com and furnish us the necessaries.

Why Stampede? Read on.

p/s: This list has been updated.

#1 – Our work

We believe that a good company let work do the talking. We have done exactly that since 2005.

#2 – We love our Project Manager

The team designed and built an app exclusively for our project manager, Zana Fauzi, to help her document scope and manage client requirement changes throughout the entire project lifecycle. It boils scope down to simple, tiny, chewable chunks. We call it The Scope Nazi.

#3 – Eastern Standard Time

While not all our team members work EST, we’re just as perky at 4 in the morning Malaysian time. Okay, maybe a little over-caffeinated kind of perky.

#4 – The Zombie Apocalypse Thing

We take zombie apocalypse survival seriously at Stampede. You should too.

#5 – Awesome clients

We still keep majority of clients we have since Stampede was founded in 2005. We grow with our clients, regardless where they are in the world. Good relationship with your client is not a cost. It’s a tangible and very real benefit.

#6 – The P4wning Sessions

Every week, during our Stampede meeting, the designers will take turns mashing up artwork featuring everyone on the team and the trending flavor of the week. Our Happy Things session? Legendary.

#7 – Caring is Cool

Sometimes when you’re not looking, the team whips up something cool for you behind your back. Also, if you have the need to acquire a bath tub, Zana got that covered too.

#8 – Always Be Learning

Need the latest book published by your favourite web person? Looking to join Google DevFest? Attend WebCampKL? Learn zombie-apocalypse survival techniques on Left4Dead server? Got that!

#9 – Team Vacation

Few years back, we took up 3 villas, each with their own swimming pool, in Bali. Last year, we went to Phuket and did this. Now there are talks about doing Kathmandu. Who knows?

#10 – Employee Satisfaction Survey

We started polling anonymous employee satisfaction survey this year. Team happiness is very important to us so we want to know what the company can do better.

Bonus – Stampede Getaway

Every few months, we also have weekend getaway sessions in KL. We are known to rock the penthouse floor with our musical instruments, fueled with an all-night binge of free-flow satay.

Join us! Write to jobs@stampede-design.com or head on over to our Facebook page to see what we’re up to.

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On-Campus Interview

Shaza Hakim — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:41:31 +0000

Consider An On-Campus Interview

You are an IT student, black circles under your eyes from that last attempt at submitting your Final Year Project in one coherent piece. You have an interview with a web company and you’ve heard all sort of cautionary tales and advise about your future career.

The university indulges you but being in IT, you can’t help but feeling marginalized over your fellow soon-to-be engineer friends. This is after all, an engineering university, where engineering future is made.

You are under-motivated, overworked and just barely made it to your 8.30 am interview. You heard you are one of six students selected from a pool of forty. You’re confident that your well-ironed shirt will leave a good impression, until you see another student arrived in a black suit with a sleek briefcase in tow, looking all polished and caffeinated. Suddenly you feel like an underdog. Ain’t life grand.

You walked into the interview room and exchanged greetings with the interviewers. They looked young and somewhat casual, probably mid-20s. They screened your resume and you started to sweat. You began to wonder if you spelled “proficient” correctly. Acting nonchalant, you flashed your biggest smile. Then one of them shot the first question,

How good are you with PHP?

I dare say the students we interviewed that Friday morning were in for a surprise.

Why We Interview?

To most companies, this is a blasphemy. “Of course you interview to hire more people in order to grow your business and generate more income.” I disagree.

Stampede’s hiring rate is one person a year, but we work hard and interview far and wide to get that one person. I believe that you do not have to hire many to achieve whatever goals you choose for your company. In most cases, you’re only adding unnecessary overhead to your otherwise agile and flexible team.

The number of employees you have is not a prerequisite to a successful business. You can be successful by staying small if staying small means keeping your people happy and giving your client work quality no bigger company can. By hiring at the rate of one person a year, Stampede is able to focus on training and introduction to our work culture, not by how quickly the person can start hacking codes. Most importantly, we are able to grow sustainably, without compromising our values.

Why Fresh Graduates?

Amazingly, this is the least-tapped pool of young talents in Malaysia. Most companies either look for candidates with significant industry experience or fresh grads with outstanding academic qualifications. Passion is often not in the equation.

Here’s what I think. People with experience tend to have one very big disadvantage: they bring with them culture from their previous work place. When they join Stampede, they tend to be highly individualized, not ready to share knowledge or responsibility. They sometimes conflict sense of teamwork with personal gain. Stampede is an office-politic-free environment. We keep communication flat so we can avoid elaborate hierarchical structure. This is not the case with other working environment where hierarchy is a way to manage and control.

In my years of interviewing and hiring, I personally find that fresh graduates should truly be the darlings of the industry. They are young and idealistic, eager to be an active part of the team. They are not (yet) affected by bad life choices. Most importantly, they bring a different level of energy to a company.

Some managers balk at the training cost. It does take more effort and patience to guide these high-octane powerhouses towards the right direction, but at the end of the day, we are in the business of nurturing talent and giving them work they are passionate about.

When you have a team of people truly invested in their work, you are doing it right.

“How Good Are You With PHP?”

Because we have a web developer vacancy, Dov did the preliminary filtering this time around. He easily trimmed a stack of resumes into six short-listed faces – a feat I never quite managed to do. A resume can be very misleading, with happy internship pictures and big company name-dropping. The most essential element we looked for was promising web programming skill. You may have interned at Intel but if you’re not good in PHP, then we’d rather not be wasting your time.

Dov as usual, was very direct about his requirements. He’s very involved with the hiring process of any new programmer and can be brutal with questions. There were times when I wished I weren’t in the student’s shoe. I am sure Shaiful and Guo Lin know this well. When he’s interested with a student’s PHP work, Dov would reach across the table, grabbed the laptop and dissected the code himself. It wasn’t a pretty sight when he ever-so-gloriously did an SQL injection vulnerability test via the login prompt. The student went pale. He only got his colors back when Dov said “That’s okay, you’re new.”

My questions, on the other hand, were centered more on the soft skills – what aspect of web development that really interests the student, what he aspires to, what an ideal workplace is like to him. These are important because we are, at the most basic, a team. We spend a great deal of time working together so the next person to join the team should be just as fun. Besides, I was due for a Stampede dinner that weekend to relay the summary of our interview to the rest of the team.

Some of the students however, were interested in other fields. One was into computer networking and the other quite a decent ASP programmer. They were honest enough to let us know the type of work they’re interested in. You could easily see that these are good students, though perhaps misguided by their seniors to simply settle for any job opportunities.

My advise in return, don’t compromise your interest. There’s only so much opportunity in life to do what you love, so start steering your way towards that now.

Was It Worth It?

For sure. The students left the interview room happier than when they came in. That alone makes it a good interview day for me.

(wonderful photography by Antontang)

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Interview @ TEC 2009 (a.k.a the Badass day)

Shaza Hakim — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 04:36:49 +0000

Job interview is an event here at Stampede. We dig seriously talented, happy bunch of people who take pride in their work. Some of our clients charmingly call this the “Stampede Material”. So the next one to join must be “badass” enough (Shaiful sure wins the prize for coining terms – my favourite is his “hot damn”).

Stampede’s TEC interview room

It was a privilege when we were approached to build the website for UTP’s annual Technology, Education and Career (TEC) week. While Stampede is not exactly in its head-hunting mode, we have certainly enjoyed the resulting sponsorship perks, where we get to have job interview sessions with graduating students. It was not a a typical job interview per se. The idea was to provide interested students a conversational medium (hopefully casual enough) so they can ask us questions about the industry, web technology and current trend in web-relevant career.

We were aiming for a relaxed, no-protocol, more-discussion type of experience. Instead, it turned out to be a really intense interview marathon day.

The Pre-Interview Test

Because I remember well what I know about the web when I graduated from UTP – which was trickling at most – Shaiful and I figured a simple test prior to the interview would help us gauge each candidate’s web development skills. I admit I’m not a resumé person – I’ve known high-achievers who memorize textbooks and armed with resumé so littered with As it made me cringe.

So we scoured the web for simple CSS, XHTML and PHP tests and compiled a list at 2am prior to the interview day. Boy was that a good move. We immediately were able to spot real talents from the rest.

TIP: When a candidate established that doctype is missing from your XHTML test and then write it for you by hand, you hire them. It also applies to the guy who supplied you the name of a none-too-common typeface on a whim. Pay attention to these people.

Initial Expectations

Communicating thoughts and ideas well is high on my list, so we require each candidate to prepare a simple presentation of ANY web projects they have previously worked on. Nothing too daunting, just a short and sweet 7-minute before the actual interview starts.

The first one seemed nervous. He didn’t have a laptop with him, just a thumb drive, but he nailed it so well on Shaiful’s machine that I was happy he stretched past the 7-minute mark. We could all see that real work was done for that 7-minute. The website was about various photography techniques, something he must be very passionate about because you couldn’t help but feel his enthusiasm. It was an honor for us, so thank you, Aizat.

As we go through interviewing each candidate, I kept a mental note the questions we asked.

So we ask them…

…to name one web industry website or blog that they visit regularly.

Not quite what I had in mind – while Deviantart is a reasonable answer for a web designer, most of the students encounter very minimal exposure to the web industry. Some cited Gmail. Could it be the intermittent connection that still plague the university since our time there 5 years ago? Possibly.

…to tell us about their favourite or most recent book.

It took some candidates longer than 5 seconds to answer this. It gives me the impression that reading is not very important. It should be.

…to give us an insight of what they know about W3C.

Two-third asked us to repeat the acronym. Three have no clue what W3C stands for. Web standards is almost an alien concept except to a precious few whose curiosity serves them well. Almost all shared the same sentiment that a better industry-relevant web course is in dire need at the university.

…to share with us what they know about Stampede.

One answered that he didn’t get to visit Stampede’s website prior to the interview because he was occupied with the preparation of another interview. With a multinational company, that is. While we’re not a exactly a giant, we’re pretty good in what we do. Not checking who you apply for job from is ignorance at the very least and a waste of time to both parties.

Don’t go for an interview unless you really want to work for the company.

Stop. Then smile and walk in happy.

I saw a few somber and uninterested faces. I love nervous and frazzled candidates – we had a few – and I take it means they care enough about the job they’re applying to actually be worried about the interview. One candidate was so intent at not smiling that you can almost see rainclouds over his head. But the instant he smiled, the room lit up. Then just as quickly, he resumed the dark, unforbidding look again.

Be very careful when you decide to don the serious, professional look. Unless executed flawlessly, it could work against you. Not many companies would hire Mr Sourface.

We didn’t mean to keep you waiting.

We would like to extend our apologies to candidates who had to wait over two hours because of scheduling mix-ups. I later learned that a few shortlisted candidates withdrew last minute due to lack of presentation material. To make better use of time, the organizer decided to call in candidates scheduled for afternoon session.

It would have been great if we knew of the change of plan but that was not the case. So while they waited diligently for a supposedly expedited session, we were under the impression that we have more time with each candidate. A mix up all in all, but one I absolutely regret nonetheless.

Watch the Team’s page.

I sense a change very soon!

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Back Hiring!

Shaza Hakim — Sun, 25 May 2008 02:52:17 +0000

As the demand for usable web design grows, we find it necessary to have an in-house talent in both website planning and the intelligent way of doing design. We’d like to keep the team unique and fun, so I’ve decided to scrap the boring resume-reading and “I-dont-have-an-online-portfolio-but-I-know-I-can-do-this” emails communicae.

Here’s What We Need

Discuss the following design elements…

Typography
Color
Layout Arrangement
Usability
Overall Aesthetics
XHTML/CSS

…of the following websites:

It would also help if you can point 1 (ONE) design element that steals the show for each of them. There is no right or wrong answer – all we really need to know is if you have the eye for design and details and if your taste matches ours. The sky’s the limit to the deserving candidate and you’ll be working in a team that is just as passionate as you are in all things web. If yearly team travel strikes your fancy, you’ll find us a ridiculously happy bunch too!

Goody, let’s get started and send this baby over to studio@stampede-design.com!

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You got fluid?

Shaza Hakim — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 23:39:53 +0000

We’re hiring!

Stampede is now looking for individuals with bright mind, the right attitude and most importantly – someone who gets things done. If you are good in logic and PHP and have substantial amount of experience with XHTML/CSS, do drop us an email at studio@stampede-design.com. Experience with Joomla is a huge, huge plus.

So fire away!

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