Everything we do, we do it thinking in the long term. We pride ourselves on the fact that we don't have employee turnover. We go for years without losing employees. While in other companies employees stay on average one year (or less!), at MarsBased the average is almost five years and counting!
This means that we would like to have you for years to come with us, so we can grow together.
Being a small company gives us the advantage of being able to sit down with our employees on a regular basis and define their career plan with them: no arbitrary goals, no force-fed promotion to management, no bullshit.
We will check in with you regularly and define together a set of goals for you to accomplish so we can increase your salary and maybe give you a new title.
A few examples of this are:
- To work on at least two mid-sized projects in a new technology you don't know.
- To be in charge of the DevOps responsibilities in all the projects you're in.
- To be able to manage international projects successfully.
- To contribute at least once per month to the blog of the company with technical blog posts.
- Etc.
We've got a lot of projects going on, some bigger than others. We try to rotate people between different projects so that they stay a maximum of 12 or 18 months in the same projects. However, because of project constraints such as the language of the client, management workload and so on, this might not always be possible.
We are a small-sized company. We don't have a lot of roles.
We have a layer of Management, consisting of the three founders of the company, and Leire/Eli, our Head of People, who enables all of us to work better and makes the company run more efficiently, but that's mostly all regarding titles.
The rest of the company members are on the same level, as there is no hierarchy. All of the employee workforce have different roles in different projects, but no titles. Everyone is a developer.
For example, you might be a Tech Lead in a project, but be a Developer in another, even at the same time if you're working on two projects in parallel. Likewise, you might be a Developer in one and a Tech Lead in the next one, and that is not a promotion, it's just a role. Going from a Tech Lead to a Developer role doesn't mean a demotion either!
That's why we don't have Tech Leads who manage developers, and we must be very careful to explain this to our candidates.
You, as part of the tech team, may have the following roles:
First, the Tech Lead, which is a very senior programmer who manages technical projects and has CTO-like abilities to weigh in into specific projects when needed. This role also gets to code, but only part-time.
Then we've got the Senior Developers, which are the most common roles we're hired for. And then, naturally, the Developers, who are slightly less experienced than the Senior Developers.
Again, this is just a role. You can be a Senior Developer in Rails for one project while being a Developer in React for another at the same time. The roles just define what can the client expect of you and what hourly fee should we charge them.
Every year, we check the temperature on the market, and we revise the salaries in the company.
We like to offer good salaries which are on par with most good companies in the market. When there is a huge correction on the market, we devise a plan to schedule raises for everyone.
Every role in the company has a salary range, to give flexibility to people coming in at different times in the company.