Company + Culture

Before meeting a candidate, your brain has already started playing some unconscious games. You get excited if you see a candidate who went to the same school as you. You get irritated if you see a company you don't like. You have already started making assumptions simply based by what is on paper, showing the power unconscious bias can have in the hiring process.

Lindsay Grenawalt

July 9, 2020

I recently returned to work following three months of parental leave for the birth of my first child. I spent most of that time doing what you’d expect: staring at the baby for hours, changing hundreds of diapers, and generally alternating between unwarranted confidence and complete uncertainty. But I also found a little time for some other projects, and I’d like to share one of them today. We used an app called Baby Connect to track feedings, diapers, and other vital information about the baby (this is the app that got the coveted phone home screen real estate that was freed when I uninstalled Slack for my leave). I also had a Fitbit Versa 2 smartwatch, saw that it had an SDK, and decided to try building a custom watch face that would show this data.

Ben Darnell

May 8, 2020

My guiltiest pleasure right now is watching apocalypse films. It’s less escapism than it is catharsis, and there’s usually a happy ending (or at the very least---they have an ending). When you watch these apocalyptic movies, the audience is always focused on the hero, holding the door closed against some encroaching danger. Few people are paying attention to the guy in the corner of the room sitting with others, telling some wild story or caught in the middle of some elaborate joke, trying to get a smile out of people in crisis.

Welcome, New Roacher! That’s how all of our Welcome Documents start, though you can expect yours to start with your name on top. Welcome Docs are how we help our new teammates get started and get past the natural new job jitters at Cockroach Labs. We understand there’s nothing worse than not knowing what to do or where to go on your first day, so we use Welcome Docs as a nice roadmap for this transition. In a previous blog about onboarding, I share how we structure Your First Weeks at Cockroach. We designed our onboarding process to be robust and informative, covering information about best practices at Cockroach Labs and providing an overview of our product, CockroachDB. However, it doesn’t account for the various nuances of each role, team, or department. That’s why our People team makes an effort to create personalized Welcome Docs to account for those specific role differences. In a partnership with hiring managers, we build the docs to make sure there’s clarity in what’s expected of you in your first 90 days. Here’s a bit more on what they look like:

Working at a startup presents a number of challenges for hiring. You have limited resources, you’re lesser-known to those outside of your industry, and you innovate at breakneck speed, making it difficult to articulate what you do. In an industry where candidates are inundated with information, cutting through the noise requires new, ever-evolving strategy.

For many people, interactions in the workplace and connections between coworkers are deeply important to overall wellbeing. We learned in the early days of Cockroach Labs that expressing gratitude and praise for the good work of our peers was deeply important to our culture, and that there existed a desire to acknowledge and appreciate each other publicly. This developed into what we call “peer acks”, short for peer acknowledgments, a forum for celebrating the good work of our peers.

Jessica Edwards

November 27, 2019

David Delaney is a Recruiter at Cockroach Labs. During office hours you'll find Dave interviewing and reaching out to engineers or thinking about how to improve the candidate experience. Outside of work most of his time is dedicated to his wife Rachel and son Ezra, but he does find time on Sundays to run around a bit in his old guys soccer league.

Throughout the year, we offer internships at Cockroach Labs to give students opportunities to gain industry experience and work on challenging problems within distributed systems. Bilal Akhtar is a Member of Technical Staff at Cockroach Labs, working on the Core Storage team and toying with KV storage engines. Outside of work, you’ll see him reading non-fiction, or giving urban photography a shot.

Learning is Good is a program at Cockroach Labs that provides a stipend for employees to take advantage of resources for their professional development. Employees are encouraged to take courses, participate in workshops, attend conferences or obtain relevant certifications.