Culture

When building out our internship program at Cockroach Labs, we wanted to be intentional about how we would support up-and-coming developers, bring in fresh ideas, and create a funnel of amazing new grads to Cockroach Labs. It’s been five years since we hosted our first interns at our headquarters in New York. As the company has grown, so has our engineering internship program. Our general philosophy around interns may be different from other technology companies: we assign real work that applies to the next releases of CockroachDB and CockroachDB Dedicated. Our interns understand that their work affects our company’s roadmap, gain a sense of what working at Cockroach is like, and build relationships with engineers on their team and leadership members.

During my first week at Cockroach Labs, our company held its annual Roacherness Awards, a ceremony to recognize and celebrate Roachers who embody our values. I was pleasantly surprised when my colleague Chelsea received an award for our value ‘Establishing Balance,’ celebrating the boundaries she sets between her work and home life through using benefits like our flexible Paid Time off policy to explore the world. This being my second job out of college, I was shocked. My experience post-college was one in which companies asked me to dive into my work with cult-like abandon, to define myself by the goals of the company first, and to let who I am come second.

G’day! I’m Oliver, a Member of Technical Staff here at Cockroach Labs. After spending the better part of 5 years in the United States, I decided to come back home to Sydney, Australia. With my homecoming, I’m happy to announce that Cockroach Labs is hiring people to work with us from Sydney, Australia! If you’re curious about me, my journey, and why I’m at Cockroach, read on. Of course, if the news of an opening sounds good, you can jump straight to the job openings we have in Sydney.

CREWS (Cockroach Employees Who Support) are groups intended to create an inclusive environment for Roachers from underrepresented backgrounds and help employees connect with their peers on a deeper level. Groups host events and develop programs to support and advocate for their members, both internally and externally. While these groups are company-sponsored, they are run by employees for employees.

Companies like Cockroach Labs are first and foremost groups of people; people with passions and drives that go beyond what they do for work. This is, by and large, what drives organizations to consider how to best enable their staff to make an impact on their communities through volunteerism, donations, and action. As a company, we have emphasized doing good in our corporate giving initiatives: we match referral bonuses with an equivalent donation to a 501(c)(3) charity of our staff’s choice, run marketing campaigns geared towards amassing donations to groups such as Women Who Code and Black Girls Code, and establish an employee-led committee each year to decide where to donate a significant corporate gift. Still, many of our people have other ways of giving back. To give Roachers the time and space they need to be forces of good, we’ve established Connect and Contribute Days: company time dedicated for our people to learn, seek understanding, grow, volunteer, mobilize, or otherwise make a positive change.

When it comes to learning, we have all benefited from social learning in the workplace. Social learning is an opportunity for people to learn from one another through programs that help us share knowledge such as peer mentorship, or attending a lunch and learn, where someone shares their expertise with the broader company. Though sometimes unconscious, we are able to learn and observe by example and then apply what we take away to our own work.

I’m a database nerd. Or, to be more precise, a DBMS nerd. What I love most about them is that while they’re everywhere, and modern society could not function without them, they’re incredibly difficult to build well. Part of this difficulty stems from the fact that databases are complex, and their construction borrows from nearly all fields of Computer Science.

Adam Storm

November 17, 2020

As a startup, our policies and processes constantly evolve. All content in this post is true at the time of publication. For the most up-to-date information, please visit our careers page or reach out to recruiting@cockroachlabs.com.

Today marks the 99th anniversary of the birth of Edgar F. Codd, the author of “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks” and godfather of the relational database. Ted Codd did for the database what Xerox PARC did for personal computers: made them accessible to everyday humans. Long before the invention of computers, there were databases. As early as 2400 BC the ancient Sumerians were carving tablets recording medical prescriptions for different ailments. Lists of Roman citizens on parchment scrolls. Card catalogs. Rolodexes. Even after computers were invented, data was far from automated. Early database models used a “flat file” system – a simple consecutive list of records that required the computer to begin at the start of the list and search sequentially. A very slow way to search, add to, and maintain large volumes of records. Meanwhile, we had a moon to get to! Humanity needed a way to access and interact with data in a fast, efficient, and accurate way.

Michelle Gienow

August 19, 2020