How would you explain VSHN to your friend in 3 sentences?
In 2014 the two founders, Aarno and Patrick, saw the opportunity for a DevOps expert company, aimed at bridging the gap between agile software developers, the need for stable operations, and cloud computing infrastructure. What started as a self-financed bootstrapped start-up, in a run-down office building scheduled to be demolished, has evolved into a sustainably profitable small business with 40 employees, and an office next to Zürich HB main station. The company focus is to help software developers implement GitOps, and to provide 24/7 customer application operations on any computing infrastructure using cloud native technology. That is, we develop and continuously improve open source software that automate all aspects of operations, to enable agility through self-service and stability through automation. About 80% of our revenue comes from our managed service products, and 20% from consulting and engineering for customer on-boarding. We have the clear goal of reducing the relative amount of professional services further, to be able to focus more on product development. As a supplement to the answers on this page, we recommend you to check our VSHN Handbook where we go more into details: https://handbook.vshn.ch
VSHN AG - current job openings and Transparent Company Profile
🛠️ Tech stack & Development process at VSHN
Technologies that we use
Can I choose the hardware? What is your coding setup (IDE, OS, Build server, Cloud provider)?
You can pick any operating system as long as it has a decent browser. We use only 100% cross-platform tools, and we have a decent mix of Windows, Mac, and Linux machines in our company (of course our cloud-native engineers are overwhelmingly Linux users!).
Our software development process
How can I grow as a developer at your company (career paths and learning opportunities)?
Although VSHN is one big team, you are part of one "squad", to learn the specifics of our work from your peers and share with them your thoughts and experience (and with the rest of the company, through weekly internal education sessions). Topics that affect or interest multiple squads are discussed and decided in inter-squad "chapters", where you can learn from the experience of the rest of the company. With more experience you might want to learn and take on additional roles in addition to software development, like squad master (in charge of squad planning), customer project lead, product owner, recruiting, pre-sales engineering, etc. Depending on your interests you can do the additional roles part-time, to spice up your daily work, or move into the new roles full-time once you feel confident to do so. Moving between squads is also a way of learning something new and shift the focus of your work.
Do you prefer always writing your own software for everything or use frameworks if they fit?
Whenever we write our own stuff (like we are doing right now with our Project Syn) we have a good reason for; in this case, we wanted to make it easier for our engineers to manage large numbers of Kubernetes clusters with a single set of tools. We also publish a lot of that as Open Source projects, giving back to the community. Otherwise we are quite pragmatic, and reuse Open Source code as much as we can.
🔍 Check out the active job openings at VSHN AG
👩💻 Company culture
What are your key values and what are some daily work examples of them?
We have a page in our Handbook where we enumerate our values, and we welcome anyone to take a look at them. As an example, one of those values states the inclusion of VSHNeers in decision-making. This is pervasive across the company; not only we decide as a group who to hire, but we all take part in deciding the salary structure, the organization of the teams, and even small details as the kind of snacks we stock in the fridge. We consider this participation a major element of our culture, and there is not a single day when this does not happen.
How diverse are your teams? What is the typical team size and structure?
We are around 42 VSHNeers now, of which 20% are women. We also have quite an array of nationalities in the company: Portugal, Morocco, Moldova, USA, Finland, Ecuador, Argentina, and of course Switzerland. Our official language is English, of course, which helps everybody communicate with one another. VSHNeers are self-organized in Squads, described in detail in our Handbook. Squads have between 6 and 9 VSHNeers.
Do you offer any helpful initiatives for parents with young children?
Young and old, as a matter of fact: we are one of the few companies in Switzerland offering four (4) weeks of paternity leave for fathers. There is more information in our Handbook (as usual!)
What is your remote work policy?
It is very simple: as long as your team knows if you are available or not, and as long as Swiss data protection rules are respected, you are free to work from wherever (and whenever) you want. Our transition to a full-remote company during the current sanitary crisis was smooth and productive, without any loss of productivity. Of course we missed each other a lot, because we like to hang out and work together in person; but as a team we found out we can work 100% online without problem.
If you do Agile - how is your agile process & release cycle? How much coding vs meetings/planning?
Software development is not our primary activity; we do, however, use healthy mixes of Scrum and Kanban to coordinate our maintenance tasks, customer support, and of course for whatever internal coding we need to do. Our most important meeting is the company-wide team weekly meeting, described in (you guessed it!) our Handbook.
Do you have some in-house tech workshops or hackathons? Is there an educational budget?
We do have an internal educational budget of 4000 CHF per VSHNeer per year. You can learn more about it in the (yes, again!) Handbook. We also have internal education sessions every week where we teach each other anything: DevOps, business, and even how to make a good cappuccino!
Can I work on my projects or open source for a part of time?
We are an Open Source company and you will be expected to work on our Open Source projects! Our projects use Python, Go, and many other programming languages, and you can see many of them in our GitHub pages: https://github.com/vshn https://github.com/appuio and https://github.com/projectsyn
📖 The Book Question™
What do I need to do to buy a 50$ educational book on company expense?
In decreasing order of required effort: 1. Post the link in the "Office Management Chapter" chat channel with the request to order it; 2. Just buy it. Use the company credit card for less expense report hassle :)
💼 How does the interview process at VSHN look like?
We have documented our recruiting process in our Handbook (of course!) To summarize, we start with a review of your application. If positive, somebody from our team will contact you for more information. And if this goes well, we will invite you for a zoom call and then a second meeting in our offices, including interviews with other VSHNeers and a small exercise for technical candidates. Finally, we will decide as a team whether or not to make you an offer to join VSHN.
Got any questions?
🕵️♂️ Extra - insider interview with Adrian Kosmaczewski
Adrian Kosmaczewski agreed to share a personal opinion about working at VSHN.
What are you currently working on at VSHN?
I am currently in charge of "Developer Relations" at VSHN, which means many things: - I'm helping in the organization of many documentation initiatives in VSHN, to help our customers find the information they need about our systems. - I'm also speaking at events about what we do, in particular about our passion for all things Kubernetes and OpenShift. - I coordinate the communication between customers and technical teams, to find solutions to complex problems. Before joining VSHN I worked as a software developer for 22 years, which helps me a lot when talking to developers and technical teams.
What do you like most about working at VSHN?
It is hard to say! I think that what I like the most is that I have learned something new every single day I have been here. The technical teams are incredibly effective, real experts in their areas, and we share our expertise continuously. Every week we have internal training sessions made by and for us, where we share solutions to critical issues, teach each other about new technologies, and much more. In VSHN there is a culture of openness and sharing unlike any other company in Switzerland.
What are the things that are not perfect and you would like to change?
The VSHN culture is built around fixing whatever doesn't work. In the past few months, since I joined the company, I have participated in many internal initiatives to change stuff inside VSHN. The idea is, "if you don't like something and you have a better idea, just tell us about it and then just do it!"