Most of this job is judgement.
Founders Network is a software engineering studio in Nepal. The people who write the code are the people who answer for whether it works.
Writing code is the part of software that can be taught. The rest is judgement: knowing which corner is safe to cut and which one will cost you a year, when to stop patching and start again, what to leave out, and how to explain a trade-off to somebody who does not write code. That is what we look for when we hire, and it is most of what you are paying for.
It is why a project starts with reading and asking questions rather than with an estimate. Then we tell you what we found, including the parts you will not enjoy hearing: that the feature you asked for will not fix the problem you described, or that the quickest route means retiring something you already paid for. It is the least popular week of any project and it saves the most money.
After that the work is deliberately unglamorous. Someone else reviews every change. Tests are written alongside the work rather than promised for later. Decisions are written down where the next person will find them. Monitoring goes in before launch, so problems reach us before they reach anyone else.
Not everything we build is for somebody else. Living with our own software, the upgrades and the bills and the alerts at three in the morning, is why the fifth year matters to us as much as the launch, and why we argue about handover and monitoring before anyone has written a line of code.
The people who do the work.
Everyone here has built something other people came to rely on, and then lived with the consequences of how they built it. That is the experience that counts: not a list of technologies, but having been on the far side of a launch and learned from it.
We hire slowly, we keep people, and we put whoever is best suited on the hardest part of your problem rather than on a proposal. When a piece of work genuinely needs a specialist we do not have, we bring in somebody we have worked with before, and we tell you who and why.
Our afternoon is Europe's morning and our morning is the American evening, which gives us four hours of real overlap with either, and a habit of writing things down for the hours in between.
Tell us what you are trying to build.
A paragraph is plenty. An engineer reads every message and replies, including the projects we turn down, with a reason and, where we can, the name of someone better suited.