We're a team of 60 dedicated reporters, engineers, and businesspeople, based in a sunny perch in the Financial District of San Francisco with bureaus in Hong Kong and New York and remote workers in many other cities.
We founded The Information in late 2013 with a simple idea: write deeply-reported articles about the technology industry that you won't find elsewhere.
In the years since then, we've moved markets, gotten the early scoop on billions of dollars of acquisitions and told you what's happening deep inside companies like Apple, Facebook and Google. Our stories have been followed by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Bloomberg and other major outlets thousands of times. How we compete is simple. We recruit the best reporters, give them the freedom to write about important topics and tell them not to worry about the small stuff.
Because our articles are deeply reported and written for an engaged audience, they have real impact. Our coverage of the secret terms of VC deals—and what they mean for employees—has reshaped how some investors and companies approach those deals. And our Future List project about the lack of diversity among tech investors has been cited by more than a hundred publications.
Quality stories breed quality subscribers. As our subscriber community grows, we're investing aggressively in our team and reporting. We believe this formula is far more scalable than relying on traffic or conferences, and it's 100 percent aligned with our readers. We aren't ad-sponsored, because our readers agree that quality reporting is worth paying for.
Unlike most other news sites, we don’t have venture capital or corporate owners, but like other publications, we do sometimes do business deals with companies that we cover.
We're not looking for engineers who are already experts in our tech stack - We want people who are experienced enough in coding to know what works and what doesn't, and are passionate about building great user experiences in maintainable code.
We use a three-interview process. The first two are usually remote; the last is in our office.
First, we like to see if our interests match, via a phone conversation (or at a nearby cafe if that's convenient to you). We'll tell you about The Information - as a business and a mission, and then about our engineering team and process - and ask you about your background and interests, what you're excited to get out of your next role. We look forward to lots of questions going both directions, about technology and culture and anything that helps you decide if we sound like a good fit for you! This interview typically takes about 30 minutes.
If that goes well, we ask for a couple of examples of your work. Then we try you out on a coding task, done remotely using a screensharing tool. We'll give you a real-world challenge we have and discuss approaches to solving it, then give you time to code a small-scale solution. Here we're looking for you to ask the right kinds of questions to choose a good implementation, and then write smart code and automated tests. We like to spend roughly an hour on this.
Step three is the half-day visit to our office (or virtual equivalent, in video interviews). You'll sit down with each of the engineers on the team, and also meet others in the product team. This is where you'll get a chance to tell us about the work you're proudest of. We'll want to understand where your tech strengths are best and where you're looking to learn. We'll ask you to explain technical decisions you've made; identify edge cases; and explain how you identify and resolve bugs. And you'll be able to ask all you like about our engineering and our engineering culture. You'll see that we don't believe in interview by ambush; we want a friendly and open exchange so we can really get a sense of how we'd work together.