What do you care about?
We want to work with folks (both colleagues and clients) who want to make an impact, and who care about the craft of product building.
We are an employee-centric organisation, and are always at the service of our members.
How do you help people upskill?
We choose our clients carefully, and often lean towards projects that offer learning opportunities for us.
We rotate folks between projects to ensure that we always have interesting challenges to think about.
We encourage people to take time off client work to learn a new language, or skill. This doesn't count as vacation.
Many a nilenso member has conducted classes (such as Haskell lessons) at nilenso. These are often open to the public as well.
Besides this, we sponsor people to conferences (in India or halfway around the world), and have a liberal "buy any books or tutorials you want" policy.
How are company responsibilities shared at nilenso?
Running the company is a joint effort.
We appoint electives representatives who handle the day-to-day running of the business and related decision-making. Everyone is a mentor, and is actively invested in the professional growth of their peers. Employees are encouraged to participate in hiring, training and business development activities.
There are many ways that one can contribute to the company that overlaps with personal interests: speaking, volunteering or organising meetups and conferences, writing, or doing a really great job on a project all help us find great people to work with (both colleagues and clients)!
I'd like have a life outside work. How do you make this possible?
A full month for us is 140 hours. This includes company activities such as hiring, standups or G&L (where we share something we've learnt with our colleagues). Most folks spend ~120 hours on their project, but this may vary slightly.
Except to deal with the odd production issue, we don't work late evenings or on weekends. We manage timezone differences by communicating asynchronously as much as possible. We have dropped clients whose idea of a "full day" differ from our own.
We encourage people to take regular breaks during their work day, and time off between projects.
Do you consider diversity at nilenso / in tech a problem?
We do, and it's one we take seriously.
The inbound applications we receive are overwhelmingly from cis-male candidates. We acknowledge that this is a problem, and are working on changing the demographics of our applicant pool so it is more representative of the world we live in (vs. the world we work in). Here's how we're going about this:
- Ensuring that the language in our job posts is not gendered
- Promoting our job posts in communities that are more diverse, such as WomenWhoCode, wmn; etc.
- Encouraging under-represented candidates to apply
However, we don't merely want to improve the optics at nilenso, we want to move the industry forward. We have taken a number of initiatives towards this. Among others, we have
- run paid internships geared towards under-represented members of the tech community
- run ClojureBridge and RailsGirls workshops aimed at arming more women with Clojure knowledge
- sponsored members of under-represented groups in tech to IN/Clojure and other conferences
- sponsored wmn; events
Nivedita and Deepa are at leadership positions within nilenso (which is rare even in companies who have reasonable gender diversity overall), and we look forward to seeing more members who are not well represented in technology lead nilenso.
We are committed to doing more, and will continue to push for greater diversity and inclusivity both at nilenso as well as in technology overall.