Maria Gutierrez, VP Engineering at FreeAgent, on the company’s experience hiring from our intensive software development course.
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Read the transcript:
At FreeAgent we help freelancers and small businesses to manage their finances. We build software that’s easy to use and understand so that they can really focus on running their businesses and not worry so much about their taxes or how they get their numbers together.
I used to work at LivingSocial, and five years ago we did our own bootcamp in the offices, bringing people from other backgrounds to learn to code and to join the engineering team there.
We had a lot of success and brought aboard about 24 engineers into the team, so I had that experience of what you’d expect to get from people that go from nothing to joining a team with about 12 to 16 weeks of learning to code.
So far we have two engineers who’ve joined the team, Peter and Katrina, and we couldn’t be happier. They’ve brought a lot of new energy to the team and different skills we maybe didn’t have here, so I think it’s been a really valuable experience for us and a great way for us to continue to add new talent to the team.
Today, building software and new systems is not just about having very specific computer science backgrounds. We do need people with expertise in those areas, but there’s a lot more to building the right solution for our customers.
So having a mixed team with expertise in different areas – some of them will be experts in the technology, others will be experts in the domain or the process of how we get things done – and having those people working together ultimately provides a much better solution and the result the customers get is much better.
So I’d really encourage considering that as an opportunity to bring a more diverse pool of talent to your team, because ultimately it will make your product better.
Visit the FreeAgent website.
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