Guidewire®

Careers: Development

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Are you looking to eke out your days as a veal calf in a beige cubicle? Perhaps you'd like to work 70 hours a week to hack out buggy, mediocre software on a ridiculous schedule? And then start all over, just more tired? No? You're sure? Because that's what life is like at most software companies.

Guidewire is different.

Talk to our developers, QA engineers, and product managers and you'll immediately sense their enthusiasm for our unique culture. We started our company to have a place to write software the way we wanted to write it: by respecting the power of smart, motivated people to find the best possible way to do their jobs.

What's it like to work here? Find out about life at Guidewire,
and check out what our developers have to say on the
Guidewire Development Blog.

People make the difference.

When you start in 2001, in the middle of the biggest tech bust ever, you get to hire some great people who then attract other great people. Sure, everybody says "people are our most important asset" and "our people are the greatest". But what if it were really true? Well, you'd let them run the place, for starters, and that's why our dev teams have been meeting every month for eight years now to figure out how to improve what they're doing. And if you really let the engineers run things, you would wind up with a minimally-managed and meritocratic culture, where influence comes from the quality of your ideas, not the loftiness of your title. Guidewire is about great people, but it's more about the great people: it's very much a company of individuals, who are free to express their own ideas and talents. We're people, not resources.

But take it a step further: what if you could build a company where engineers and testers and product managers wanted to work for five, six, eight, ten, or more years? Then you could really build a culture around difficult and costly engineering practices that only pay off in the long term – like test-driven development. Our engineers tend to have unusually long tenures by Silicon Valley standards. At Guidewire, we understand the benefit of having people invested in the success of the company for the long haul, and we're committed to creating an environment that keeps people here.

Go ahead, have a life.

If you want people to stay, don't work them to death! It sounds obvious, but an amazing number of software companies have burnout built into their very DNA. Sometimes it's because their business model is lousy and they can't really afford to hire enough people to do the work. Sometimes it's cultural. But most often, it's just because it's easy to force engineers to work that way. Keeping the pace manageable is hard work – it means being honest with your customers (and, what is sometimes more difficult, with yourself) about what you can and can't deliver and when. It means not getting distracted with the million things you could do, and instead focusing on the few things you must do. It means planning plenty of buffer into your releases so that you don't get hammered by the stuff you didn't plan for. It means keeping weak, time-wasting people off the team and out of your hair. It means measuring your actual capacity, not what you wish you could do, and using those facts in your planning. It means putting effort – lots of effort – into automated testing and agile processes and tools to squeeze the boring, repetitive,
error-prone, time-sucking labor out of the dev process. So...work at Guidewire. Then go home and have a life.

Shhh...it's a secret.

When you were a hotshot 14-year-old hacker, you probably didn't dream of writing insurance apps when you grew up. Come on, be honest. But here's the secret: these aren't anything like the apps you're imagining. Guidewire is a technology company that pushes boundaries all over the place. We deliver highly configurable and upgradeable applications that handle billions of dollars of transactions. Doing that takes ingenuity – like inventing a UI layer that is design-time verifiable, or building a metadata-driven system that can be adapted to meet wildly varying data capture requirements. Insurance companies have extremely complicated business processes, some of which have never been modeled before in software. There are problems there to keep your brain busy for a while! Not to mention keeping those billions of dollars safe, which takes something like 100,000 unit tests. Testing at that level...well, that's a whole research effort of its own.

You know what you want.

If you've bothered to read this far, you probably didn't just fall off the turnip truck. Sadly, like many of us, you've probably worked at companies with barbaric delivery schedules, or a dozen layers of management, or a fundamental ignorance about the need to invest in refactoring, automated testing, and developer tools. You've probably also seen enough to know that quiet companies doing unglamorous work can be extremely profitable and stable, and you know what that means for you and your career. So, go
ahead – look inside the plain brown wrapper.