2 Days of Training (Zendesk and PayrollHero)

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Our office in the Philippines is used by quite a few companies for events. We have, what we call, a “think tank” that works great for events. We have been the location for Google, Amazon and most recently been asked to host an event for Zendesk.

Zendesk is running a day long session on April 17th 2013 in our think tank and since Zendesk and PayrollHero share a few customers we thought it would make sense to run a bootcamp of our own the day before to make it easy for companies that wanted to attend both.

Join us!

PayrollHero – April 16th 2013 (Register Here)
Zendesk – April 17th 2013 (Register Here)

Amazon’s “Architecting with AWS” at PayrollHero Manila

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

Amazon’s AWS ASEAN team, based in Singapore, was looking for a location for their 3 day “Architecting with AWS” event that they were planning on holding in Manila. We offered the PayrollHero offices, and this morning 35 engineers from some of the Philippines leading organizations showed up for three days of learning from Amazon’s AWS technical team.

Attendees needed to have some existing knowledge or experience with AWS and have a conceptual understanding of the key infrastructure services (EC2, S3, RDS, etc), their features, and how they are used.

Over the next 3 days, attendees will be immersed in all things AWS and will walk away with a great knowledge of what Amazon’s solution is truly capable of. Here are a couple of pictures from this morning. Looks like it is going to be a great few days!!

A View Through The PayrollHero Window (pics)

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

We operate in multiple locations, and have for quite some time now. We use technology to bridge the gap so that teams in all locations can feel like they are together. Google Hangouts and Facetime are the goto technology but we find using large TVs on either end make all the difference. The teams literally feel like they are standing in the room together. We do daily standups, one on one meetings and group calls standing in front of these TVs with team members all over the world. (we even set it up during our 4 month stint in San Francisco)

(above) The view through the “window” from Manila, Philippines into Whistler, Canada

(above) The view through the “window” from Whistler, Canada into Manila, Philippines

Amazon Web Services ASEAN Head Drops By PayrollHero

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

A couple guests dropped by the PayrollHero office today in Manila. Franco Eisma, who is our representative at AWS and is no stranger to the PayrollHero dojo dropped by with Richard Harshman, Head of ASEAN and India for Amazon Web Services.

Maybe next time we can get Richard boxing with our head trainer?

(L – R) Stephen Jagger, PayrollHero Co-Founder, Franco Eisma
and Richard Harshman, Amazon Web Services

PayrollHero Opening New Engineering Office In Whistler, BC

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

PayrollHero is opening an engineering office in beautiful Whistler, BC.

PayrollHero was born out of our own need at OutsourcingThingsDone.com, where we tried to find a payroll, time and attendance solution for Southeast Asia, specifically the Philippines, but nothing seemed to have the complete feature set that we were looking for. So, we decided to build our own, which is now, PayrollHero.

As part of our journey to grow PayrollHero and build out a team of passionate engineers we knew we had to be different if we wanted to attract top talent and compete for team members against Facebook, Salesforce and the like in the valley, as well as Hootsuite in Vancouver.

Our Manila office is fantastic, but we want to continue attracting top talent and knew we needed an engineering office in North America. So, we decided on Whistler, BC for its beauty, reasonable cost of living, excellent lifestyle and its proximity to Vancouver and Vancouver’s international airport.

We will be announcing more details on our “Adventure Engineering” job availabilities shortly… but consider this… if you want to work for a great startup, with a huge goal and work from Whistler and Manila, then PayrollHero could be for you. Drop us a line for more details.

(L – R) PayrollHero co-founders Michael Stephenson, Stephen Jagger and
PayrollHero Advisor Eric Reis at The Four Season’s Hotel in Whistler, BC (Feb. 2011)

PayrollHero’s New Biz Dev Hero – Michael Hwang

Posted on July 25, 2012 by

PayrollHero has a new addition to its growing team of 14. On June 30, 2012, PayrollHero welcomed its newest team member, Mike Hwang, formerly from Automatic Data Processing, Inc, (ADP), a business outsourcing solutions provider based in the U.S.A., into the team.

A welcome party was held in his honor and he was warmly welcomed by his fellow team mates at PayrollHero’s office in BGC, Taguig.

From Left: Stephen Jagger of PayrollHero, Kenneth Palacios of Novare and Mike Hwang of PayrollHero at the Future Perfect Interview

Mike, originally the District Manager for ADP, is now PayrollHero’s Business Development Country Manager, specifically for the Philippine Market. With his extensive background in business development and sales in the payroll services field, he makes the perfect business development country manager and the team is definitely looking forward to his contribution to the company’s success.

Mike will primarily be handling Business Development, specifically in the Philippines, and will be constantly on the lookout for new business relationships in the country.

PHRug Monthly Meetup: Backbone Orientation (Manila)

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

Last May 31, 2012, newbies and seniors from renowned tech companies flocked to our PHRug Monthly Meetup hoping to deepen their knowledge regarding Backbone.

Guests from companies such as Friendster, AELogica, Clinic-IT, Devez, EngineYard and more, as well as a handful of freelancers were present for this much awaited meet-up.

Not surprisingly, a good number of representatives from the top Ruby dev shops in the Philippines were present as well.

The meetup was spearheaded by PayrollHero’s own senior developers Suman Mukherjee and Piotr Banasik, both core members of PayrollHero’s talented dev team.

The first half of the meetup was dedicated to learning more about “backbone”, as presented by Suman. He tackled subjects like the conditions in which backbone may be used to single page web apps and a few workaround in backbone. He also gave some good practices, tips and suggestions in the use of JavaScript and showed a practical example of how PayrollHero has used backbone for its features.

Our head developer, Piotr Banasik, capped off the meet-up with a discussion regarding Chef for automating server set-up and deployment.

The talk aimed to provide peer developers, especially our own PayrollHero developers, an overview of the usage of Backbone.

The agenda proved to be fruitful as members of the audience expressed their gratitude stating that it was a great help since they were not quite familiar with some workarounds, documentations, design patterns and good practices regarding backbone.

After the talk and a pizza dinner, the guests were given a tour around the office and some could not help but admit that they were quite impressed with PayrollHero’s Kanban boards, strategies and procedures. They marveled at the office set up and some were given a demonstration of some of PayrollHero’s functions.

Though they were not present for the meet-up, representatives from Amazon Web Services also dropped by to have a quick tour of our office.

The night ended well as developers and tech geeks alike mingled and engaged in various discussions regarding their current learnings and their insights.

(So cheers to another successful meet-up and we are looking forward to seeing more of you soon.)

Amazon Web Services Asia Pacific Visits PayrollHero Manila Offices

Posted on June 30, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

Franco Eisma (on the right, boxing) and Dhruv Parpia (taking photo) from Amazon Web Services Asia Pacific dropped by the PayrollHero Manila offices from Singapore to spend some time with our team and to provide solution architectectural assistance. They also ended up doing some training with our inhouse Head Trainer Rei Moralles in the PayrollHero gym.

Saturday Offsite Team Breakfast

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

Every Saturday the PayrollHero team meets outside of the office for an offsite breakfast. The idea is to bring the team together, outside of the office environment, so that they can communicate about whatever is on their minds – work or personal.

Here is the team this past Saturday having breakfast at Chelsea’s:

Payroll Hero House Comes To An End

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

Yesterday was the last day of the rental agreement with the owners of the Payroll Hero house in Cow Hollow. It was time to pack up the house and return it to the owners so that they could move back in. So, we did just that, we packed up what we have accumulated in San Francisco and packed it into a UHaul so that I could drive it back up to Vancouver. Yesterday, at about 9am, Bryan Garcia and I got into the UHaul and took off for Vancouver. The original plan was to stop somewhere mid way along the i5, but as we got rolling, we just never stopped. I ended up driving the whole way, 15 hours, back to Vancouver, arriving late last night.

But, this is not the end for us in San Francisco, actually only the beginning. The idea of the 4 month stay in San Francisco was to decide where we needed to be, San Francisco, Manila, Vancouver, Whistler? ? We have decided to put a presence into San Francisco (along with a BC office) and we are working on the details of that now. So, watch for more information as we get settled.