Many people when they are looking for software developers look at things like reviews, the company website, and past projects. Which you definitely should do. But one thing that is much harder to see, and perhaps even more important is what the company culture is.

Why should company culture be part of the conversation when considering where to do software development? It’s because when you are working with a software development agency, for the next 3 months to years you are part of their team, you work with their employees and you follow their processes, so if their company culture doesn’t fit with yours, than you may have a lot of friction.

To give you a quick and simple definition of culture, company culture is what the company values and does. And there may not be a “right” company culture, only different cultures. For instance, Apple values privacy, integration and simplicity. Android on the other hand values openness, functionality and cost. Which one is right?

Depends what you value.

When it comes to software development, some companies are for people who value price over everything, others are all about the design, some are about performance etc.

With that said, let me describe to you our company culture, and how it makes a difference when you come and work with us.

First, let’s start with our name, Approachable Geek. Can I just say that most software development agency names are ridiculously obtuse. Not to throw anybody under the bus, but names like “Inoxosoft”, “Fingent”, “Radix Web” really do not help our industry seem any less technically daunting.

Which is why we took the radical step of naming our company two English words that actually describe what we do and who we are.

Approachable means friendly and easy to talk to. In every interview round we have for developers we have more than 100 applicants, and look for their ability to interact with other people, we’re looking for friendly people. Why? Because that matters a lot when you are a non technical person looking to get a question answered.

The second part of our name is “Geek” means someone that is excited and technically proficient in a subject. We put our developers through a fairly rigorous coding challenge to be able to see their attention to detail and “geekiness.”

When you have people that are Approachable Geeks, in our opinion, makes a world of difference for our clients, and for our own life satisfaction. Isn’t it nice to know that when you hop on your call with your devs you can feel at ease?

Let’s now go through our mission statement, we build software humans love to use. What does that mean? Well to us it means working on software that solves a real problem, in a way that people find delightful to use.

In practice this means we turn down a lot of projects that come our way because we can’t see how it will be impactful even if we were to build it in a beautiful way. It also means rigorously user testing the design work we do so that we can ensure that people really do “love to use” it.

And finally when it comes to coding it means that we are meticulous about our process, in our business of building apps and coordinating many people to constantly accomplish large projects on a high level, the way you do things matters a ton. So the only way to really build software people love is to have a killer process, and we do.

Are we a good fit? Well, it depends, the types of clients that we work best with and know we can generate great results for have the following characteristics:

1. They have a project that solves a real need in the world
2. They have the budget to fund great software development, and any marketing/maintenance costs that always come after launch
3. We think they are capable business people we’d like to work with
4. Their projects will last between 6 - 12 weeks
5. They value thorough design, well tested code and are comfortable with the process of software development