HN Explorer

Ask HN: Are there actually any exciting companies in Seattle?

19 points by seattle_spring ↗ HN
I'm considering moving jobs, but I cannot for the life of me find a company that has a product or mission that I can feel passionate about. It's either work for one of the behemoths, or work for a company that provides services to other tech companies.

Does anyone have any tips for places I should be looking into? A bit of background on myself: 5 years full-stack experience with a bend toward modern JS / webapp development. 1 year management experience.

Am I doomed to work for Amazon?

16 comments

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larrykubin
I am personally excited about Redfin and Socrata. Redfin made is super easy for us to find and purchase a house. We went from knowing nothing and not having a realtor to closing on a house in 30 days. Socrata is working to open government data.
kvanderd
I would checkout http://www.ivysoftworks.com/. The CEO of this company was the CTO of a company I worked for. Extremely developer friendly, great visionary etc.
seattle_spring
Thanks for pointing me in their direction! Their office is actually right next to mine. I always walk by and wonder what they do.
thematt
I lead the software team at Blue Origin, come check us out. We're right outside Seattle.

https://www.blueorigin.com

zerr
Any C++ positions without US citizenship requirement?
thematt
We are hiring C++ folks, but applicants for any position (not just software) must be a US Citizen or permanent resident alien.
_gwlb
Checkout Intentional Software. It's a startup of about 70 people funded and led by billionaire CTO Charles Simonyi. They built a platform for developing domain-specific languages (on top of the CLR), and are now developing some pretty incredible collaborative productivity apps on top of that platform. Their recruiting slogan is "this is why you chose computer science," and after interning there for 6 months I can say that's 100% accurate.

Pay and benefits are equivalent to what you'd get at Microsoft or Amazon, without the corporate BS.

http://www.intentsoft.com/careers/

zerr
This company was founded more than a decade ago. Why do you think it is a startup? Aren't they profitable and/or do they have poor work-life balance?
ninetax
Climate (http://www.climate.com/) has a great office in Seattle. I haven't been, (I'm in the SF office) but I hear the culture is excellent. Contact me: skhalsa@climate.com and I can refer you to the right team.
it_learnses
are you taking interns? I'm a grad student in Canada.
reverius42
(Disclaimer: I work at Dato.)

Dato is a venture-funded startup in Fremont (right by the canal, down the street from Google). We are on a mission to make the power of machine learning accessible to the masses, with a great team and an exciting opportunity ahead of us. We maintain and contribute to open source projects. Personally, I think it's really exciting and I am passionate about it.

https://dato.com/company/careers/

seattle_spring
Dato was actually one of the companies I had already applied for! Definitely looks cool. Hoping to hear back from your team next week.
adventured
Everyone has a different definition of exciting of course.

That said, Zulily, DocuSign, Moz, Zillow/Redfin, Apptio, Simply Measured, and Tune are all in Seattle.

shivaas
Check out Remitly! I'm the Co-Founding Engineer and we are building our Engineering team! Remitly is a mobile centric start-up in Seattle, WA and we provide an easy and affordable product for immigrants to remit money home. We're located right next to Pike Place Market. Ping me if you're interested in learning more.