Expensify Blog

EDIT (2/2/11): This position has been filled. Please see expensify.com/jobs to review any currently open positions.

Hi! I’m David Barrett, the founder and CEO of Expensify. We’ve got a ton of money in the bank, paying customers, hundreds of thousands of users, a fantastic (albeit small) team, and a super pimp office. Things are really starting to take off, and we need your help taming the chaos. Here are some examples of what we’d love your help with:

• Shop for the office! – About that pimp office we mentioned above… it’s currently empty. We’ve got ideas of what we generally need and a generous budget to go and make the awesome office of our dreams, but are too busy to actually go out and do it. We need someone with a good sense of style to turn these empty rooms into an exquisite workspace:



• Schmooze on company time! – So many parties, so little time. We need someone to attend all sorts of social, tech, and industry events to carry the Expensify flag to the far reaches of the Bay Area. We need everybody to know that we’re here, we’re hiring, and we’re ready to rock their socks.
• Walk my dog! – And keep the kitchen stocked, handle the mail, schedule meetings, arrange travel for interview candidates, get coffee for guests, answer the phone, and so on. All the little things that every once in a while just need to get done.
   
• Build a company! – Anybody can do the above. But only you can do that while also helping us build Expensify in a very tangible way. Do market research, analyze data, contact customers, support users, execute PR and marketing campaigns, manage contractors. We need it all; the more you can and are interested in doing, the more we all win.

The job isn’t strictly a difficult one; on its face it doesn’t require any specialized skills. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, or just anybody can do it. In fact, I’m hesitant to even ask because I’m certain I’m going to get a flood of resumes from everybody in the universe. So while I’m sure you’re awesome, please make it really easy for me to find you by emailing me the answers to the following questions:

1. What’s your website? Or blog, or Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever you use to identify yourself online. We’re looking for a social, web-savvy person; let’s see what you’ve got!
2. What’s your story? Basically, where did you come from, what are you doing with your life, what do you want to do with the rest of it, etc. (FYI, we’re only considering local candidates for this position; relocation isn’t an option. Sorry!)
3. What do you hope to get out of Expensify? Obviously there’s fame and fortune (obviously), but what else?
4. Shopping is easy when you have either no budget or a fixed budget. But we’re somewhere in between: We have money and are willing to spend it on things that are nicer than strictly necessary. But we don’t want to waste our money unnecessarily. Rather, we’re looking for some level of spending that’s “nice and maybe a touch extravagant at times, but without going overboard”. Given that, and given the vast range of options available, how will you decide which — for example — conference room table to buy?
5. Going along with the previous question, provide a link to a conference room table that you’d recommend we buy. It should be about 8 feet long and comfortably seat 8.
6. What experience do you have talking on the phone in a professional manner?
7. Imagine a candidate is flying in for an interview next Friday, and will be staying the weekend. Go check out the travel websites right now and pick which exact flight and hotel you’d book for the candidate. (Once again, you’re not being given a strict budget to work within: I want to see what you feel is a reasonable balance between cost, convenience, and comfort.)
8. Anything else? Why are you the perfect person for the job?

That should do the trick for now. Write up answers to the above questions, email them and a resume to dbarrett@expensify.com and I promise I will personally respond — hopefully in a timely manner, but definitely sometime. Thanks, I’m genuinely eager to meet you soon!

-david
Founder and CEO of Expensify
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Hello technical recruiter! (Or anybody else interested in Expensify hiring.) The challenge of running a startup with too few people is it’s hard to find the time to hire more.  That said, it’s absolutely crucial that we do, as soon as possible.  With this in mind, I’ve tried to capture some of the most common questions into one place.  I have no doubt you’ll have many more, and I am more than willing to make the time to answer them, but can you please do me the great favor of reading these first:

What roles are you trying to fill?

Junior engineers.  We only hire generalists that can do everything, but you might consider any of the following job titles to get into the right ballpark:

• Junior software engineer
• Mobile app developer
• Junior web developer
• Web designer
• Usability designer

How many people are you trying to hire?

We would like to continuously hire as fast as we possibly can for the foreseeable future, potentially 1-2 a month for the next year or more.  That might sound slow — lots of companies suck up employees by the hundreds — but it’s fast for us.

Why have you hired so slow?

For better or worse, we’re very, very picky — we’re looking for a very certain sort of very unusual person, and we’re willing to wait as long as it takes to find them.  I know everybody says that, but we actually mean it.  So we’ve had a process that has been slowly pulling in very high quality candidates, but just too slowly.

What hasn’t been working that you want to change?

I feel the overall message we have is a good one — the company is the leader in its space, we have an incredibly solid team, a great working environment, etc.  But that message isn’t getting out to enough people, or the right people.  For example, we’d previously relied heavily upon Craigslist, only to learn from our more recent hires that they don’t even look there (and in fact view it as a place to get scammed), and it was only through sheer luck that they stumbled into one of our job posts.  Accordingly, we need you to carry the Expensify banner to the far reaches of the earth and make sure everybody who wants to work at an awesome startup considers us as an option.

What do you want me to do?

How exactly you do that is up to you — after all, you’re the expert.  I’m more or less open to any crazy ideas you have on how to find candidates: the “input” is up to you.  However, I need you to act as a strict filter such that I’m not overwhelmed with unqualified leads.  The best filter we’ve found is our application questions. Accordingly, when you find a candidate you think might be a good match, I suggest:

1. Email jobs@expensify.com with their resume (if you have it) or just say “I’m contacting person X” — this gets your representation of the client “on record” in case they contact us direct.
2. Ask them to fill out these questions and either send them to us directly, or send them to you (and you forward to us).

What’s up with these crazy questions?

The people we look for are very unusual, and we’ve found that the resume format is almost never informative: they’re formulaic, riddled with bulleted lists, and like boiling down a fine steak into hard leather.  The people we hire have incredibly complex and interesting stories, and a resume just isn’t the right format to capture that.  Indeed, many of our candidates have actively applied precisely because we didn’t ask for a resume.  They don’t like them, we don’t like them, so we’ve just cut them out of our process entirely.  Instead, we ask candidates who are interested in Expensify to just tell their real story, in their own words.  This has a variety of effects.

• It actively discourages people who aren’t interested (or interesting) from applying.  This is a good thing — it saves them time, saves us time, and everybody wins.
• It lets us evaluate actual writing and programming skills from the very first contact.
• It gives us a detailed picture of their full skillset, history, hopes, and dreams.

But most importantly:

• It actually attracts the best candidates.  Everybody we’ve hired *liked* the questions.  They weren’t a burden to fill out, they were a relief: they showed that Expensify actually cared enough about them to look past their resume and learn the true story.  And (again, for the right person) they’re actually fun to fill out.

They’re unorthodox; most people don’t reply.  But those who do are the tiny, tiny subset we *want* to reply, and that’s all that matters.

There’s no way people really like these questions

I understand it’s hard to believe.  But here are some recent comments:

Get back in touch if you want to get back in touch, and thanks — and I do mean this sincerely, not in an ass-kissy way — thanks for putting together such an enjoyable application process!

I like the way you posted the job position; it gives me great flexibility on providing a response.

I found your posting on Craigslist yesterday — aside from the fact you started out by saying the job was perfect for new college grads, which I am, I found the questions interesting, so I decided to take a crack at answering them.

I’ve filled out the questions found on your website. It was rather enjoyable to fill out, I hope I’m what you are looking for.

And so on.  It’s crazy, but works.

What are non-salary perks and benefits?

The main perk is that we truly value our employees (as evidenced by how hard we work to get them).  And we’re not really a “perk heavy” company, instead favoring just better salaries.  But additional perks include:

• Health
• Dental
• Matching IRA (retirement account)
• Free lunch (at whatever restaurant you want, not crappy takeout or cafeteria)
• Annual trip overseas to work from a remote beach (on their own dime,  unfortunately)

Will you sponsor a visa?  Relocate?

Yep.  For the right candidate we’ll bend over backwards.

What sort of candidates are you looking for?

Junior engineers with better skills than senior engineers.  They’re out there; we already have several.  They’re just really hard to find.

How can I identify a good candidate?

Some hallmarks of a good candidate are: (These are just examples; not all will fit.)

• Probably not from the Bay Area
• Started programming in elementary or middle school
• Wants to eventually start their own startup
• Has a really interesting life outside work
• Has done a lot of travelling
• Dabbled with 3D graphics or video games at some point
• Went to school but was incredibly bored and disappointed
• Worked their way through school
• Has bounced between a lot of jobs
• Hasn’t worked for anybody you’ve ever heard of
• Wants an opportunity that appreciates and exercises their full talents

Why junior; don’t you want senior people?

The sort of person we like has such a fast career trajectory that our only option is to get them while junior; after a few years they’ll be so successful we could never afford them — they’ll be starting their own startup and thus unobtainable.  There are always exceptions to this rule (especially people who are just looking around for a better opportunity, or people whose previous startups didn’t pan out), but in general unemployed senior people who need to actively look for a job are almost implicitly unqualified.

Why self-taught; why not PhD’s?

There’s nothing about programming you can’t learn with a cheap laptop in your parents’ basement.  The sort of person we like goes to school because they felt obligated to, or has been misled into thinking it’s somehow required for a good job.  But they typically realize this mistake well before finishing any sort of PhD program — often well before graduating with any degree at all.  People who go through the full program without realizing that they’re wasting time and paying money to be *less* employable are typically not the people we’re looking for, though there are always exceptions.

Why generalists; why not super awesome specialists?

Programming isn’t hard.  Anybody who says it is just isn’t very good.  Granted, there are some extremely esoteric things that are genuinely hard or for which specialization is useful or required — supercomputers, device drivers, advanced artificial intelligence, computer vision, etc.  We don’t do any of those.  We want people who can do pretty much any non-specialized programming task, ranging from C++ networking, SQL queries, PHP web development, HTML layout, AJAX interaction, jQuery manipulation, etc.  Contrary to popular belief, technology isn’t the hard part.  It’s the process of deploying technology in an effective way to solve a meaningful problem — *that’s* hard.  And generalists in effect specialize in that.

How do I pitch Expensify to a candidate?

Though Expensify is the leader in its space, has won lots of awards, is growing fast, and so on — it’s still not a household name.  We’re not looking for people who want to work for Google, but for the *next* Google, before anybody heard of it.  Expensify’s biggest single advantage is genuine and immediate empowerment: you don’t need to “prove yourself” before getting to the good stuff.  You start the good stuff right away.  Accordingly, you never work “for” Expensify. You work for yourself, furthering your own passions and career (and wealth), side by side with the rest of us.

Is a Master’s degree a showstopper?

No. It’s a demerit, but not a showstopper. (A PhD almost is, however.) The question is: why did they go back to school after graduating with a Bachelor’s degree? Did they go back because of some really amazing opportunity, or because they couldn’t find a real job and were afraid of the real world? There are no hard and fast rules — find the story behind the facts. If that story is compelling and shows the person is really awesome, that’s what matters.

Recognizing that nothing is a showstopper, what are some flags?

Here are some things to be wary of:

• Graduated before 2005. What have they been doing for the past 5 years that still caused them to be interested in a junior programmer role?
• Uses a lot of Microsoft technologies (ASP.net, C#, Windows Server, etc). Nobody good uses the Microsoft stack without an amazingly compelling reason, though I honestly can’t think of any.
• Has a bunch of certifications. Those certifications are meaningless; good people don’t want or get them.
• Has worked for a large company (>1000 employees) for a long time. It’s good to work for a boring company for a short time — that teaches people what they want to avoid. But anybody who sticks with it for too long must not really care about their career.
• Doesn’t have a website. Not everybody has one, and certainly nobody *needs* one. But good people have them anyway to experiment with and host personal projects.
• Sounds boring. If you sound boring in email, you probably are boring. That’s not always true — I originally rejected one of my employees due to sounding boring, and boy was I wrong. But though there are exceptions, most people aren’t exceptional.

Where can I read more information?

We’ve got a bunch of information online.  We’re adjusting it all the time (before it was too terse, currently it’s a bit too verbose), but you can read it here:

https://www.expensify.com/jobs

Or, just send me an email at jobs@expensify.com.  Thanks for reading all this, I really appreciate your  help!

Perfect for new college grads or people who are bored with school and want to get started in the real world!

Hello, my name is David Barrett and I’m the CEO of Expensify. We do “expense reports that don’t suck!” (Google “expensify” to read more.) We’re getting crushed under an ever-growing pile of super awesome work, and I need one bright soul to help us dig our way out. I can guarantee you fun, an amazing opportunity to learn, and the siren’s call of distant riches. But only if you are *all* of the following:

• An incredibly hard worker, even when it’s not so fun. There is a ton of work to do, and a lot of it downright sucks. After all — we do the sucky work so our customers won’t need to. I need you to buck up and grind through server logs, user emails, source code, and bug reports, without complaint or supervision, and come back asking for more.
• A cool person to be with. Not a crazy party animal, just someone we can trust, rely upon, hang out with, bounce ideas off of, and generally interact with in a positive way, both personally and professionally. In fact, this is one of the most stringent requirements we have: would you be fun to hang out with day and night on some remote, exotic beach? This isn’t a rhetorical question, either: every year we take the company overseas for a month (on your own dime, sorry) and work incredibly hard while having a ton of fun. We’ve done Thailand, Mexico, India, and Turkey. Where do you want to go this year?
• Super talented, in a general way. We’re going to throw a ton of work at you of every possible sort, and you need that magic skill of being able to figure it out even if you have no idea where to start. On any given day you might bounce between super low-level coding, super high-level technical support, updating our user documentation, inventing/designing/building some new feature, etc. This is not a code monkey job — you’re going to be a full participant in the process, and you need to bring your own unique blend of skills to the table.
• Specifically talented in a programming way. You can instantly visualize solutions to problems big and small. Your code is always clean, well commented, has good nomenclature and indentation. You can switch on a dime between C++, PHP, Bash, Cron, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Dwoo — not because you know them all, but because you’re the sort of person who can just pick it up and figure it out. If you’re this sort of person, you’ll know what I mean. If not, then this position isn’t for you.

And there are a bunch more, but odds are if you got this far, nothing I can do would stop you from applying. That’s a problem because while I know *you* are awesome, it’s actually really hard and time consuming to find you in the midst of the literally hundreds of other applications I get from everyone else. So this is where I’m going to ask my first favor: can you make it *really easy* and obvious how great you are, so I don’t accidentally overlook you?

There are probably many ways to do that. But the easiest way is to help me out by answering the following questions:

1. What’s the URL of your website? If you don’t have one, stop now — please save us both the time by not applying.
2. When did you start programming? Tell me about your first project, what technologies you used, and why you did it.
3. Why do you do it? Why programming instead of all the other exciting careers out there?
4. What was your last/current job, what was/is your total compensation package, and why did you / do you want to leave? Can I have the name and phone number of your last manager? It’s cool if you left on bad terms — I got fired from my last job, after all — just tell me the story.
5. If you were rich, what would you do, and why?
6. Without doing any research or asking any friends, what language is each of the following code fragments, and what’s wrong with each (if anything)?

      .centered { text-align: center; vertical-align: center; }
   
      tail /var/log/syslog | grep warn
   
      char* data[] = { "foo", "bar", 0 };
      int strlenSum = 0;
      do { strlenSum += strlen( *data ); } while( data++ );
   
      The time is <? time() > o'clock.
   
      var a, b = { c: "d" };
      alert( a.c );
   

7. What’s the biggest, coolest project you ever built from top-to-bottom? Not a component; a whole self-sufficient thing.
8. What’s a salary and equity cut that excites you? Like, truly feels “wow, I’m being valued”. What’s the minimum you’d take? Don’t skimp on the question: it’s gnarly, I know. But let’s just get it out in the open, up front.
9. Why do you want to work at Expensify, specifically? Not something general about startups overall; what is it about us in particular that interests you?
10. What’s the catch? Everybody has strings attached — you’ve got something you need to finish first, some big vacation commitment coming up, some particular fear you need addressed or requirement you need satisfied. It’s fine. But what is it?

Please send your answers to dbarrett@expensify.com. If you make an honest attempt at answering the questions above, I promise I’ll respond personally — hopefully in a timely fashion, but definitely sometime.

Thanks. I’m genuinely excited to hear from you. I know there’s someone out there who will be a perfect fit for our team. I really hope it’s you, and I appreciate your help in patience while we figure that out together. Thanks!

David Barrett

Founder and CEO of Expensify

Follow us at http://twitter.com/expensify

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