The technology team at Birchbox is responsible for development (and maintenance) of the company's customer-facing sites (in the United States, France, the UK, and Spain), managing hosted and cloud infrastructure, and closely supporting other teams (logistics, marketing, et al.) in our 110+-person company. We work with a wide variety of open-source technologies: Debian-based servers; Chef deployments; Ruby on Rails, Java and PHP services; and Python, Perl and R scripts. The size of our team and the breadth of its responsibilities means we rely on our engineers to be self-motivated and quickly follow through on tasks without requiring close supervision. In return our engineers are given leeway to use their own initiative.
Our team spans software engineering, technical operations, product, and data science. Our challenges include:
evolving our software and systems architecture to support a rapidly growing customer base across multiple countries and languages;
designing and implementing the best user experience for our customers; We are striving to revolutionize online retail.
using data, complex algorithms, and statistics, to personalize the Birchbox experience for our customers, both offline and online.1
Early user of simple here and, while their design was excellent, there was little else to recommend them. Plenty of other banks offer no-fee atm access and have apps. Those banks, unlike simple, reliably process transactions. They went down more than once, which meant my card was declined. The customer service rep was nice when he told me their servers were down. No advance notice. It would be nice to have a bank that, you know, works.
It is reliable! Growing pains happen. Downtime happens. Expecting five nines from a little startup, even when it's out of beta, is silly!
I've built three companies now and it is really hard! Balancing up-time, product development, customer support, and bug fixing is difficult. I'm sure interfacing with legacy banking systems made it even worse. If it were down all the time (the way Reddit was during their major growth phase) then I would agree, that is an issue. But they are not and were not - insignificant downtime is not something to criticize, there are other more constructive things to criticize about the product which is consistently evolving anyway.
It upsets me to see people on HN get up on their soapbox and say demoralizing things about trivial issues (that are part of the life of a growing product) of little startups that are doing well, continuously improving, and doing their best.
Help us reinvent retail. Birchbox is a discovery commerce company which helps subscribers find new products they love. We're growing by leaps and bounds. Just 3 years old, Birchbox has over 400,000 subscribers in 4 countries. We're hiring data scientists and engineers at all levels.
We work with a wide variety of open-source technologies: Debian-based servers; Chef deployments; Ruby on Rails, Java and PHP services; and Python, Perl and R scripts.
Our team spans software engineering, technical operations, product, and data science. Our challenges include:
* evolving our software and systems architecture to support a rapidly growing customer base across multiple countries and languages;
* designing and implementing the best user experience for our customers; We are striving to revolutionize online retail.
*using data, complex algorithms, and statistics, to personalize the Birchbox experience for our customers, both offline and online.
Misleading headline. The study is more accurately paraphrased as 'where you grow up.' The authors found little difference between those who moved when they were young from a low mobility area to a high mobility area.
I would love to see a deeper investigation into how mixed-income neighborhoods positively impact mobility. It's a relevant point when discussing housing subsidies and future infrastructure projects. Many of the low mobility families in the NYT article have no car or only one car. In modern cities which depend almost exclusively on private-car transportation, this is a serious obstacle to higher wages.
Birchbox is growing by leaps and bounds. We're hiring software engineers at all levels. Birchbox gives engineers freedom to innovate as we make awesome product discovery services for our customers.
The tech team at Birchbox is responsible for maintaining and improving the company's customer-facing site (http://birchbox.com), managing hosted and cloud infrastructure, and closely supporting other teams (logistics, marketing, et al.) in our 60+-person company. We work with a wide variety of open-source technologies: Debian-based servers; Chef deployments; Ruby on Rails and Java services; Python scripts; and PHP and Perl too. The size of our team and the breadth of its responsibilities means we rely on our engineers to be self-motivated and quickly follow through on tasks without requiring close supervision. In return our engineers are given leeway to use their own initiative.
