White Whale Web Services is seeking a permanent employee to join our headquarters in Oakland, California. The position will begin as a permanent part-time position, at a competitive salary with full benefits, and will hopefully become full-time after a few months.
The ideal candidate for this job will be a geek with a sharp eye: someone very comfortable with code (though you need not be a programmer), but also able to make thoughtful judgments on site designs and user interfaces.
We've got a few ideas about who we're looking for. But we're not interested in dictating all your qualifications. The fact is, the four of us share knowledge in a wide range of areas, and we're looking for someone who can contribute on multiple levels.
There are a few firm requirements, which include the following:
- Comfort in PHP environments. We code our Web applications in PHP/MySQL, and do most of our dynamic work at the interface between XML and PHP. We have put in a lot of time building our approach to writing code, and we'll expect you to spend time learning the White Whale approach to Web development; however, we're willing to learn from your experience as well. Even if you're not a programmer— which is fine— you'll still be expected to be conversant with the basics of PHP syntax. (No ASP, .NET or Cold Fusion developers need apply. Nothing personal.)
- An eye for clean, usable, accessible Web site design. If you are a designer, that's great; you will have the oppportunity very soon to create designs for some exciting and high-profile clients. Even if you don't thin
- Start-to-finish, soup-to-nuts project experience. Even if it's a labor of love, we need to see work for which you are responsible for every single pixel and line of code. A site you built by hand for your friend's rock band, or a simple CMS you built for a freelance client, is much more interesting to us than a Web site for a major corporation that you worked on as part of a team.
- Flexibility. This means a lot of different things, and we pretty much require all of them. We need someone who can juggle projects, but also focus, follow through and complete a job when the time comes. We need someone who can work equally effectively from home or in the office
- Creative interests other than Web development. This is really important. One of the things we all have in common is that although we love technology, we also value our time away from the computer, and enjoy creating things other than Web sites and applications. We are photographers, poets, knitters, and musicians. (Two of us are each of those.) Although we don't spend a lot of time thinking about the connection there, it's probably true that a healthy creative outlet outside of a computer screen makes it easier for us to look at our online work with fresh eyes.
Beyond these requirements, here's our wish list:
- Experience in Web development for higher education, the market where we do most of our work. In the end, higher ed web dev isn't that different from any other; the goal is to create thoughtful, effective, easy to manage Web sites that stand the test of time. But the higher ed market is certainly a different atmosphere than you'll find in, say, e-commerce, biotech, or Web 2.0 startups. It'd be great if you had some experience with that environment.