recruitment 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.

The post We Are Hiring appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

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)

The post On-Campus Interview appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

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!

The post Back Hiring! appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

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!

The post You got fluid? appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.