About Jellyfish and what they do
Jellyfish was founded about five years ago. And the overall goal we have is to help engineering teams answer the question, Where are we spending our time? And, you know, like, we want to do that without interrupting engineers or anything like that. So we take all of your JIRA data and your data and other things and pull that in and try and estimate, Hey, are you spending a lot of time on bugs, our roadmap, things like that? And from that we can help you answer questions like, how much time are we spending on, you know, resolving unplanned bugs, and is that number going up over time, because that's a really important thing. And from that, there's an enormous amount of information, you know, we can try and help engineering teams really work on the right things. Because even if you're being productive, and you're working on the wrong thing, that's still not great.
Randall's professional background
I'm an engineer, software engineer here at Jellyfish, I have a bit of an interesting background, I've worked at, you know, big companies, Netflix and slack. And I worked at a lot of little startups as well. So I tend to be a little more spread out than most people. You're working primarily on the UI, but also helping out a lot with the backend stuff. And particularly like SRE DevOps, things like CI, CD and observability. So I'm a little all over the place.
Details on Jellyfish's engineering team
We are the the engineering team is just under 50. Right now, though, that doesn't include the research team. And they're pretty tightly coupled with us as well as some of the success engineering as well, it's really nice to kind of have the strong coupling between with between other parts of the organization, we're not existing in a silo. how we're organized is with what we call mission focused teams. So we have a big chunk of work. And the team has given the mission of doing that in an excellent manner, which is so much better than like, it's not just like, here's a bunch of tickets go. It's like, no, your job is to make this the best I possibly can. So it means that many teams not just need to understand, hey, the codebase, but also like, Why do customers use this feature. And it allows I think, engineers to be much more free in their work. Something we talk about a lot is like, are you working on the next thing or the right thing? And not getting into that mindset where you just like ticket ticket ticket, but like know, what really is the bigger picture here. And I really liked that.
Cool projects engineers get to work on
There is lots of really interesting work. That's one of the reasons I like it here. And I think that one of the big projects we just launched is the benchmarking tool, which allows our customers to say like, okay, we're spending 30% of our time on blocks. What does that mean? You know, like, they it takes us, you know, 7.2 days to complete an issue is that good is that bad, and being able to take data from the overall market, and more specifically, hey, companies like you, and being able to compare and say, hey, you know, it takes you seven days to fix an issue. But that puts you in the 75th percentile, so you're doing better than average, is really helpful for leaders to kind of contextualize the metrics that we generate. So that was a really cool project putting together because it was putting together all the data from all of these different companies, and then building out tooling on the front end to say, hey, let's make it useful to pull that data in and say, Hey, I'm looking at our metrics. What does that actually mean?
Details on the tech stack
Yeah, so one of the things that we prioritize is using tooling that has like an established foundation of you know, there's other companies that are really proved the utility of and so we can, like I can say, a rattle off like, okay, we're a Python back end, will you use Django and postpress Docker and deploy to AWS, and the front end is reacted TypeScript empty. And so that's the sort of buzzwords of all of our stack. And I think the focus for us is much more on how do we use those tools to provide value and understand you know, why our customers use your product.
What to expect during the interview process
I think that there is any interview is going to be a two way street. You know, we're going to interview you and ask you a bunch of questions, but you're also interview, hopefully interviewing and a lot of different places, you've got options, and we know that and so we want to allow you to have the time to come in and ask us questions. So yeah, come in, ask the hard questions. You know, if you don't just love the softballs, and every interview we'll uh, we'll have time to have that would kind of reverse interview ask us questions, sort of thing. Because we want to make sure that you are happy with where you land here as much as we're happy with you. The other thing is our interview process, we don't do any of the hacker rank things, or the solve the n plus two queens thing. It's, it's about, Hey, these are things you would work on in the day to day like, Hey, here's a problem, let's, you know, write some code to solve it. And, you know, or, Hey, let's talk about big projects, you've worked on things like that. So it's much more practical, much more like, hey, this interview, it's not possible to have an interview be one to one with your daily work here, but we try our best to get pretty close. So that we get a good signal on that rather than Did you memorize your algorithms textbook from sophomore year?
Why now is the ideal time to join
Oh, now is a fantastic time to join Jellyfish. I think one of the big things is, you know, we were used to seriousIy we've got a lot of money. And so we're really moving forward in terms of like, Let's do so many things. Because in the startup, it's always that matter of like, okay, we only have so much bandwidth, how much can we get? We're really opening up the floodgates, and there's so many cool projects getting spun up right now. Unfortunately, can't talk about a lot of them, but you should definitely interview and come work on them or perhaps even you know, start your own here. And so yeah, I think right now is fantastic. Because we're really moving away from the early stage startup of like, oh, no, we need to get this customer like no actually we're doing great. We just need to like keep going and there's there's so much cool things to do and such a great team to work with.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
