Basic corporate hygiene - financial soundness, legal compliance, ethical work practices - apart, there are a number of crucial parameters we should be evaluated on as an employer.
Challenging work
Career growth
Innovation
Work culture
Zero politics
Compensation
Work life balance
Job security
We are probably best described as a services company with product ambitions. While we do work for hire, we are also seriously investing in our own product lines or coding simply to get a high. We therefore prefer to build teams at Coriolis as opposed to simply hiring on a client's behalf. That makes for an interesting mix and a wide variety of job profiles to fit into - from designing user interfaces to writing kernel drivers. Take your pick.
We stake claim to a number of very experienced professionals from both product and service company backgrounds and the one thing we valued the most in our careers was the learning opportunity we were afforded. In turn, we take pride in providing a supportive environment for another generation of professionals. No, we don't take classes or give lectures. Instead, we identify interesting real world problems and set out to solve them.
Been there, done that and are still at it. Engineers here have upwards of 30 patent applications between them and Coriolis continues to innovate on an ongoing basis for both its clients as well as itself. We also actively support the open source movement across a wide spread of areas.
Long before "minimum government, maximum governance" became fashionable politics, we at Coriolis have been living the maxim "minimise management, maximise productivity". We have no career managers at Coriolis - everyone codes. We don't believe in hierarchies and therefore don't implement them. You'll find yourself treated as one amongst equals, with the right to dissent. Live free or move on.
We lied, of course there is politics at Coriolis (or anywhere else for that matter ...) but you just have to be right to win an argument here. Expect to have to prove it though, 'coz almost everyone here thinks he is.
Rewards at Coriolis are very tightly linked to outcomes, both at the individual and team levels. Appraisals are event, not time driven. That roughly translates to saying course corrections are effected more often and compensation is adjusted as and when performance warrants it. Your take home isn't a function of your bargaining skills - that we guarantee.
It's not just a check list item at Coriolis. We have a 5 day week, "flexi-time" and support "work-from-home". We don't grudge the claim parents, kids & significant others have on your time. Given that many of us have worked together most of our adult lives, our social and work circles overlap.
We've weathered the lows of the economic slowdown in 2008 gracefully - as a team we chose to take pay cuts but not downsize. We don't treat our co-workers as consumables - to use and throw on a whim. While the past can never guarantee the future, it is safe to say one doesn't worry about job security at Coriolis.
