Stamen is hiring
Our busy San Francisco design and technology studio is ready to grow again. We're looking for a few people who can help us realize our vision: doing great work for the smartest people we know.
We need one or two designer/coders who are comfortable in both design and technology roles, usually in the same day and on the same job. Stamen is lucky; we get to work on a wide variety of projects. We are committed to maintaining a constant state of learning, both about our tools and about the world. We want to continue to work with people who know a lot—and are excited to learn even more.
This describes it pretty well:
'In 1996, I met a guy named Tomas Apodaca when he applied for an engineering job at Organic, where I was the director of engineering. Tomas frankly admitted that he wasn't much of a programmer, and that he didn't have the experience we needed for the position. But, he said, he was interested in learning, and he showed me a wide range of things he had taught himself to do with Photoshop. He clearly had a better design sense than any of the engineers we had at the time. I'm not sure exactly what it was about Tomas that gave me the confidence to hire him despite his very thin resume -- maybe it was born in the desperate amount of work we had to do at the time. I did, though, believe he would do well, so I decided to chance it.
'"I'll tell you what," I said. "I'll hire you and give you a computer and two months to learn Shockwave" [an earlier Macromedia product for making interactive graphic applications, like Flash today] "and at the end of those two months, you have to show me something cool." Okay, he said, and a month later he had an interactive game we presented to Lucasfilm for the Star Wars site. He later went on to be a co-founder of Angry Monkey, a San Francisco interactive design shop, and is now one of the members of Stamen, developers of the ETech backchannel visualization, Mappr, Reblog, Cabspotting, and more.
'I'm sure that Tomas would have done great things no matter what, and I've tried the same technique with worse results sometimes, but I think it is far more important, when hiring engineers, to find a fantastic person and see how they would have fun helping you, than to find the right resume. You give such a person room to grow and a challenge, and it will seem to others like you've found the secret to herding cats.'
—Marc Hedlund, O'Reilly Radar
You'll need to know and be willing and very able to learn a wide variety of web-related applications and languages, and find joy in moving seamlessly between them: php, python, actionscript, photoshop, illustrator, flash, etc. The word "etc." is a key part of our work. You'll need to love the way things look and move and feel and breathe. Digital material is our clay; it's important to us how it flows.
This is an opportunity to work with a small, seasoned and excitable group that delight in blurring the difference between design and technology. Our work and play is leading us in a direction that we don't entirely have planned out, but which ranges from modelling attention on the web to mapping live taxi data in San Francisco to understanding the ebb and flow of the news.
We can promise that the work will be interesting—what we want is the best that you can do, and more besides.
If this sounds like you, please contact us at info (at) stamen.com; no phone calls please. Qualified applicants should have an online portfolio of work (attachments? please) and demonstrated code and design abilities; we are open to various combinations of these but they are both required for work at Stamen.