Straight From The Boss's Mouth: Come Work At Cynergy

OK, with the advertisement out of the way, let me expand a little bit on who we're looking for and why we're a great place to work.

What We're Looking For

First and foremost, if you're new to Adobe Flex or Microsoft Silverlight, that's totally OK. From talking with other developers at conferences and meetings, there seems to be a misconception that you need to be a seasoned Flex developer in order to be considered for a position at Cynergy (and, well, Silverlight is literally only months old). However, nothing could be further from the truth. While we have some of the most experienced Flex developers around, this is what we're looking for:

• Passion: I put this before any technical skill because it's the most important thing that we're looking for. We want people who are as excited as we are about the RIA market and who want to continually push the envelope by developing world-class experiences for our customers using Adobe Flex, Adobe Apollo, and/or Microsoft Silverlight. When I was first looking into joining Cynergy, I was a bit skeptical as to the definition of this "passion" that people always say they're looking for, as it's seemingly arbitrary. But I can tell you from first-hand experience that the energy my co-workers have on a daily basis is both jaw-dropping and contagious, and my personal fire to get into building RIAs fit in perfectly.
• Object Oriented skills: Not everything about working here is "abstract." The reality is that you simply can't build scalable, maintainable RIAs without a solid OO foundation. You don't have to be able to recite and define every single design pattern, but you need to be able to define and understand terms such classes, objects, inheritance, composition, etc. If you have a firm grasp there, then learning the language is just syntactic sugar and you'll take right off.
• Current experience: OK, so hopefully it goes without saying that if you have current experience with any versions of these technologies that it's serious bonus points. That being said, we've found that people with solid AJAX experience do well because the asynchronous nature of the Flash Player is a web development mind shift that can trip people up. However, don't worry about what specific technologies you have or haven't worked with in the past; the reality is that the RIA market is still young and you're just not going to get resumes with four, five, or six years of real RIA experience.
• Possibility of relocating near one of our offices: Let me stress right off the bat that this is not a core requirement to joining our team. Heck, I'm currently writing this from my apartment in New York City. If you have existing solid experience or are willing to travel to one of our offices for a while at the beginning to get up to speed (we pay for all expenses, of course), working remotely is certainly an option. That being said, we do find that being in one of our offices accelerates your growth at a much more rapid pace and try to get people as close as possible to one of them. Currently, we have offices in Washington, DC; San Diego, California; Grand Rapids; Michigan; Rochester, New York; and Copenhagen, Denmark. We are absolutely going to be expanding that list in the very near future, though I'm not at liberty to disclose that information just yet (sorry!).

If you're not put off by any of those items and are looking for a new challenge, then please, please, please, send us your resume. The great part about Cynergy is that everybody is accessible, including our president, Carson Hager. To that end, please e-mail him if you have any questions that you don't think are appropriate for me (i.e., I don't deal with anything related to compensation) and he will get back to you as close to immediately as possible. Of course, if there's anything I haven't addressed here that you want to know more about, please leave a comment or contact me offline, as I'm happy to answer any and all questions myself.

Why Cynergy?

So now that you have idea as to who we're looking for, why do you want to be working here? Well, frankly, I am constantly amazed at the type of applications we're building. A year ago, I never would have thought these sorts of applications could be developed using web technologies. Now, a lot of that credit has to go to Adobe for providing us with such a powerful, easy-to-use framework, however I've seen co-workers like Andrew Trice and Keun Lee do things with Flex that I never thought could be done with the current framework features. And have you seen our CynergyTV showcase? That's just a small tip of the iceberg relative to the other applications we have built (we value our customers' privacy and we're sometimes restricted from publicly demo-ing the solutions we build for them).

While those are amazing applications, what does that have to do with wanting to work here? Well, the same developers who built those applications are still here at Cynergy and delivering better applications all the time. The sense of genuinely being a part of a team is prevalent throughout the company and I've never run into a situation where somebody wasn't willing to help, regardless of their own workload. That teamwork starts from the top, and Carson, Dave Wolf, and Keith O'Donnell (our Management Team), treat us as their equals and we are very much involved in many aspects of the direction of the company (but hey, we're still developers, so we leave many other things to them!). They recognize that without us, Cynergy will not survive, and we're very well taken care of and are provided any and all resources necessary to succeed as a result. If you're curious about our retention rate, since I've started here last fall, literally nobody has left the company. That's just the type of fun, yet professional, culture that has been built and we are fiercely protective of that.

This is an amazing time to be working at the leading RIA services firm, and you can help be a part of that success. Send us your resume because we'd love to chat!