Unbeatable Culture at Rackspace

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Culture is hugely important to me in any company I want to be a part of. Having telecommuted for many years, working in an office environment is a big step. I need to be lured, enticed, and teased. Something needs to overcome the massive convenience of remote work. It's a big lifestyle change.

A company's culture has been one of the crucial factors in evaluating such a big shift in my daily work. The culture is what makes it worth while – and fun! – to endure a commute, work in a shared environment, deal with myriad distractions, etc.

Having spent time visiting and hanging out in many of the top-tier start-up (and established) company offices in the Bay Area, I was very impressed with what Rackspace had to offer: staff, designers, sales, and engineers who were highly gifted, loved their jobs, were fanatically dedicated to their company, and didn't take themselves too seriously. After a long and romantic courtship, I finally took the plunge. Knowing that life is full of disappointment, I was fully aware that this was a risk.

As such, I was pleasantly surprised to find that after a month at Rackspace, the cultural experience was a genuine one. However, I was blown away when I attended R ookie O at the beginning of January and experienced the depth of what Rackspace has done for the past 15 years, what they offer on the whole as a company, and how they keep everything real and fun. It was such an eye-opener for me that I had to blog about it. Here's a teaser for you:

"This is what I and so many of my peers have been searching for in a technical company: a place with heart, room to grow and a vast frontier in front of us. The key thing, though, is the heart. That’s the support for everything else, and it’s something that often ends up riding in the back of the bus on a trip to nowhere. Rackspace has the heart driving the bus. This is not a conscious technical criteria for so many of us when seeking employment, but it is the reason that we grow so dissatisfied at other companies and why Rackspace has been such a surprise for me."

Incidentally, while drafting that post, two other interesting things happened:

1. Fortune magazine named Rackspace one of the best 100 companies to work for in 2012, and
2. Bloomberg released an article about Rookie O (the same class I was in, oddly; also, note that it's targeted at the "cool," cynical audience ;-) )

In 2011 we made Fortune's Top 100 list as well, coming in at #74. This year, we jumped 40 places on that list to #34 :-) How cool is that?!

Rackspace is always hiring, and our San Francisco office is growing as well. We do everything from Twisted and Python to iOS, Node.js, Lua and Java. We're in the cloud, on the desktops, and jumping into mobile devices. If any of this excites you, check out the openings!