PayrollHero Adventure Engineering Team Grows By +1

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Michael Stephenson

It’s not hard to imagine why people love to visit Beautiful British Columbia. With mountains, ocean and dozens of reasons to spend time indoors and out, those of us who live here count ourselves lucky, and those who visit can’t wait to come back.

Andrew Narkewicz joins PayrollHero

PayrollHero‘s newest staff member is Andrew Narkewicz – a Full Stack Ruby Engineer who tends to live in Ops – thrilled with his career move to PayrollHero in Whistler, where we are headquartered. Andrew attended UBC in Computer Science and most recently worked for Versapay as their Lead infrastructure developer.

What’s a typical work day like, at PayrollHero? There is no typical around here! We know that we get the best ideas from our talented recruits by giving them flexibility. Whether it’s 4-days-on and 3-days-off, or working weekends instead of only weekdays to take advantage time on the hill when the snow is best and the lines are shortest, or longer days with extra time banked for that great pow day, or a long weekend every couple of weeks. Flex-time is even more enticing when you live where the activities seem limitless, and your everyday life feels like a vacation… or at least looks like it to the outside world!

Blackcomb Mountain Pow

Whistler is proving to be a fantastic place to build a business: with its reasonable cost of living, rent, and ease of recruiting people to live and work in a veritable paradise. Whistler is a natural choice for Andrew, originally from Colorado. He loves ‘sledding’ (a casual term given to snowmobiling), which Whistler’s backcountry has plenty of room for! Andrew has joined us to live the best “Whistler Lifestyle” he can, taking every opportunity to play outside, with our blessing!

Don’t think we’re not hard at work, here at PayrollHero! Just because we post [seemingly constant] photos of our adventures doesn’t mean we don’t put in our dues! We’re busy at work, but we set up our business to attract and retain the best sales engineers, developers, iOS and Machine learning engineers, and customer service reps, so that we can create, build and maintain a great web-based payroll program.

Are you fit to be our next Whistler Engineering Team Hero? We are always looking for new teammates – at the office and at play! Drop us a line!

PayrollHero Welcomes its First Engineer in Residence!

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Michael Stephenson

Dane Natoli is the newest member to join the Payroll Hero team here in Whistler! Dane grew up in Melbourne, Australia but experienced the Whistler lifestyle for the first time in the 09/10 season during the craziness of the Winter Olympics. After the Whistler Olympics he returned home to Melbourne, Australia and re joined his job as the Software Team Lead for the Agile development shop, Lambda Software. This was all made possible by his Computer Science Degree that he received from RMIT 2007. To add to his extensive resume he also has created a website called Yaktracker, which follows his adventurous friends on their journey to drive from London, England to Ulaanbataar, Mongolia.

It’s not all work and no play for Dane! He is a huge fan of the slopes when he’s not found having a brew or enjoying some couch time with his Xbox. Lucky for Dane he is now able to put all his passions to use.

Dane joins us as apart of EIR, Engineers in Residence program. Designed to further the cultivation of one of our Engineering Core Values “Thirst for Learning”. We’ve experience that rotating engineers from different cultural backgrounds and experiences brings more to the table and enables us to continue to be agile and introduces us to different lines of thinking.

We are overjoyed to welcome Dane to our team, he is going to be a huge help. We look forward to having Dane be apart of our team and bring his personal ‘land from down under’ approach to his work life.

Oh.. what’s the deal with boots? We thought it was funny that it is common form in Whistler to leave your winter boots at the door and swap into slippers just like Mr. Rogers – no one wants a puddle at their desk.

Wanna explore a fit with the Whistler Engineering Team? We are always looking for new teammates to learn, explore and adventure with; be it at one of our offices and when playing outside! Just drop me a line and let’s chat.

Do You Work to Live or Live to Work?

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Michael Stephenson

I find myself reflecting on past travels from time to time…

Today I was reminded of a vivid bar night that took place while visiting some friends studying at the Sorbonne. It was 4am and I got into a conversation with a Swiss-German Tech Entrepreneur over how Europeans Work to Live while he thought that North Americans Live to Work.

I like to think we build companies with the spirit of Let My People Go Surfing.

So, how does “working to live” get implemented at the PayrollHero.com Whistler Office?

I guess like all things – It all depends…

There are many work schedule options anyone can elect to participate in including:

4×10; three day “weekend” every week.
5×9 and take every other Friday off.
Late morning start so you can ride the powder.
Work weekends and play weekdays when the hills are bare.

Pretty much we’re open for anything as long as you:

Have consensus with your pair if you are pairing on a new critical feature.
You attend the Weekly Engineering Meeting (Monday’s 15:07-16:07).
You present at the daily huddle on the days you are working 16:37-16:52.
If you are working on a new feature; you would be expected to attend all ideation meetings.

We understand and encourage the need for flexibility on snow days in the winter and 30 degree+ days in the summer.

What sort of work schedule would you be interested in?