Is Open Source in your DNA? It’s definitely in ours…

As a manager at SUSE, I’m constantly hiring to keep up with our growth and one of the questions I frequently get asked is ‘how would you describe your company culture?’ Now I compare that question to being asked ‘how long is a piece of string’ so I thought I’d write about what I like about working here instead because I think the two are somewhat linked:

10 reasons I love working at SUSE

1. It’s growing – The one thing that’s been constant for SUSE in recent years has been growth. Growth of the business and the consequential growth of the number of people. And not many IT companies out there have been so fortunate.
2. It’s fast – If you love the fast pace of the IT industry, then you’ll love SUSE. Like our tagline (We adapt, you succeed), we are constantly adapting and changing to meet the needs of our partners and customers better – so we’re always focused on improving what we do and how we do things – and it’s kind of compulsive.
3. It’s got history – SUSE was the first company to deliver an Enterprise Linux distribution (our President of Engineering Ralf Flaxa, has a picture of himself with Linus Torvalds at the 1st annual Linux Kongress in Heidelberg in 1994), and it still feels like the enterprising, innovative environment you’d find in a startup.
4. There’s a deep sense of honesty and openness – I think it stems from the original intentions of Open Source and it flows through every vein of the organization, driving how we partner, develop our solutions and how we work together. We call ourselves the ‘Open-Open Source Company’.
5. The people are great – they’re passionate about Open Source, enthusiastic about what they do, and are just all round great to work with.
6. SUSE is a challenger – if you think it’s more fun to be David than Goliath (I do) then this is a great place for you. Like someone I interviewed today said ‘At SUSE, I feel I can make a difference’.
7. It’s very flexible – for quite a few roles we’re often able to offer homeworking to candidates who are not close to a SUSE office – which is welcomed by many and enables us to recruit the best people for the roles
8. SUSE is nice – We actually hear this back frequently from customers and partners – it sounds odd that it should matter, but I think that working for a company that is perceived as being ‘nice to work with’ is great.
9. It’s Fun! If you’ve seen any of our crazy music parodies, videos, or attended SUSECON you’ll see that among the hard work, we also have a lot of fun.
10. We have a chameleon as a logo.. enough said!

So, now I’ve rambled on about why I think it’s great to work here, why don’t you come and join us? See suse.com/jobs for our openings (we have a lot of them)