I'm Going to Teach You That

We, like most companies, use a process that's frankly, "our own". It's most like XP, with some elements lifted from SCRUM and a few other places. We've definitely adapted, though. Even if you've worked in an XP shop before, you probably will still find some of our practices a bit different than you're used to. Most people haven't worked in an XP shop, so they're going to find it a even more weird than what they've done before.

No matter what your background, I expect to teach you our software development process.

You do have to bring some background to the table. You're probably temperamentally inclined to work the way we work in general. And you may have experience with a lot of the techniques we use, from the concept of automated tests to the use of continuous integration to the understanding of how to review code.

But I don't expect you to know that every checkin has a reviewer, and how to ask for a review. I don't expect you to magically know how much pairing we expect, or when we write a test for something and when we don't. You probably don't know our branching and merging techniques, or what it means when the orb turns red (although that one is pretty obvious!). I expect to teach you all of that.

And that's why I don't really care too much about your process background. I care about your temperament - can you work in our environment? - but not that you've studied the details and memorized the Extreme Programming and Pragmatic Programmer books. You bring the right attitude; I'll bring the details.