To help our city's new developers, fresh out of local universities and programs like gSchool, find the best opportunities, Built In Colorado is highlighting some our city's great tech companies. The companies on this list go the extra mile to push new developers to constantly learn and showcase their talents. To see what developer positions are currently open at these growing companies, visit our job board.
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LogRhythm’s internship program has proven to be a key way for new developers to get hands-on experience right away. More than that, they have a good chance at getting an employment offer if successful: all LogRhythm dev interns from the past two summers have made the transitions to fulltime employees. A current LogRhythm software development intern said on his first day this year he “was expecting that I would spend the day getting accommodated to the facilities and systems and that I would be eased into my position as a dev intern slowly through small introductions into the code base. Instead on the first day I was given a crash course of what exactly the software accomplished, and more surprisingly, I was given the actual code to look at and begin to digest. By the second day I was given my first large project of the summer: to develop one of the features being released in the next major patch. This involved me writing actual production code and dealing with that code through every step of developing, unit testing, refactoring and hardening.”
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Rally is a pair programming shop, which gives entry-level devs an opportunity to consistently up their code quality by working hands-on - and in real-time - with a senior developer at one work station. The sweet part about these work stations is that they are totally open (and movable), so devs aren’t stuck in a cubicle together all day. Engineers often drag their tables together or set up easily movable partitions to create a bit of privacy if needed. About every three months a team will take an hour or two to change it up for a new project: they move tables and walls, plug back into the power and network grid, and are up and coding again.
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Zayo offers a customized formal training program that can range anywhere from two weeks to two months, depending on developer experience-level and background. Training covers everything from company history and processes, to code structures and language specifics (Ajax, Apex, Data Mashup, JavaScript, jQuery, JSON, SOQL, SQL, VisualForce). Since the curriculum is customized for each individual, there is no formal testing process associated with Zayo’s training program. Once the skills are nailed down, devs are free to work - and to tinker, like in Zayo’s two-day company hackathons. A mix of dev and biz employees form up to seven teams, and each team competes for prizes including cash, gift cards, Jamboxes, iPad minis and Beats by Dre headphones.
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SendGrid’s ensures that people hired into roles like Support Engineering have the opportunity to grow into other engineering roles over time. Many Support Engineers use the company’s education stipend to get Computer Science degrees to help them in their promotions. Devs also often use the stipend for tech conferences such as GopherCon or Google I/O or dedicate the stipend to taking online classes on Cloudera or via Hadoop Admin training.
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Pivotal has become known for making programmers better programmers via formal apprenticeship programs (like their partnership with gSchool) or via smaller peer apprenticeships. Pivotal describes its coding culture as “results-oriented,” which means devs often work in pairs to make sure code is flawless. Employees, aka Pivots, are expected to constantly improve their skills from the moment they are hired. Even during the hiring process, Pivotal challenges prospective devs to improve by pairing them with existing Pivots on live projects during the interview so they can get their hands on code immediately.
