Engineers build things that solve problems. You don't have to be a computer scientist or have any particular degree to be an engineer. You just have to speak up when things aren't right, evaluate ideas on their merits, and build things that fix what's broken. At Thot we're all engineers, and we're focused on solving the hardest problems we can find.
We seek out hard problems at places that matter. We solve them by shipping products that work, today. They have to because the stakes are real. People rely on our products to do their most important work, which means they rely on us to build things the right way.
We make products for human-driven use in the real world. We don’t mine data. We don’t collect data. We don’t build one-off solutions.
As our company evolves, so will our products and the ways in which they transform how people and organizations interact with technology. There's so much left to build.
If you have a great idea and the will to see it through, you can effect great change. Nothing is off-limits—we’re constantly looking for improvements in our products, our processes, and our people. All voices are equal here—we hire people to have an opinion and be creative. We’re intolerant of politicking, ego, and power brokers. If your idea makes the most sense, that’s what we’re doing, regardless of your role or seniority.
Sometimes opportunities are here today and gone tomorrow. Sometimes a breakthrough on an intractable problem invalidates our previous efforts. And yes, sometimes we make mistakes. Inventing the future requires detaching yourself from the past. While we ship a couple of polished product families, we’re just getting started when it comes to building the full ecosystem of technology we’ve imagined.
We iterate obsessively on everything we do, always collecting new information about the right way to solve a problem. Existing components and processes are supplanted by new, better solutions as they become apparent. For those who built the thing being discarded, this is a cause for celebration, not sadness. Replacement is viewed as a success: we have now reached the next plateau of functionality and design and iteration begins anew.
We view software as a means of effecting change in the world, not as an end unto itself. Our mission is to help our users, the people doing the hard work on complex, real-world problems. We do this by creating technology with and for a purpose
Our work is incredibly complex, touching on computer science, data science, software engineering, public policy, good governance, large-scale distributed systems, user behavior, efficient use of resources... to name a few. It would be easy to get hyper-focused on some small aspect of this large universe and spend way too much time and resources on perfecting something good enough already.
By always staying focused on the problems our users are trying to solve, we clarify our thinking about the right way forward.