Diversity & Inclusion

Diversity and inclusion at AppSignal.

We believe in an inclusive and welcoming development community. On this page we share what AppSignal does to promote diversity and inclusion both inside and outside of our company.

Overview

A vision-led company

At AppSignal, we want to be amazing in everything we do. This vision is more important than profit. We also feel people should come before profit.

Our values are the foundation for how we believe we should act in the world. You could describe this as our character, our non-negotiable principles:

  • Act with integrity

    Example: We act and speak in a way in private, that we would not be embarrassed about if it would leak into the public. With respect, truth and choosing to do what is right over what is easy.

  • Add value

    Example: We only want roles in AppSignal with activities that have a meaningful impact on our company vision / mission. We want to automate recurring and boring tasks.

  • Act independently

    Example: We work remotely, allowing our team members to choose where they live and to shape their work at AppSignal around their preferred daily routine, instead of the other way around.

  • Work with passion

    Example: When we wake up, we should feel excited to build on AppSignal because the mission inspires us.

A welcoming company

We truly appreciate diverse personality types and points of view, and we try to accommodate neurodiversity by taking into account different communication styles, and differences in cognitive flexibility. We have (internally) created individual profiles for everyone at AppSignal in which all team members talk about their preferred ways of working, and how to best communicate with them. We think the company as a whole benefits from different perspectives and different personalities creating and building our product.

We judge everyone as an individual, not as a representative of any minority group they might be perceived to be a part of. In order to enforce this, we aim to make bias training part of our onboarding process and we also want to have this training for existing employees and management.

Hiring process

We hire in a broader geographical area, something that works because we work remotely and mostly asynchronous. When we have a job opening, we actively try to reach out to groups that experience difficulty finding a place in the tech scene. We do this by making use of different job boards and Twitter targeting when placing job ads. This way we hope to reach marginalised communities.

To ensure that all applicants feel encouraged to apply to jobs with us, we write our job postings in an inclusive manner, by avoiding gender-coded language and jargon. We also have space in the application process to give context on background, neurodiversity, pronouns, and past experiences. Multiple people review all incoming job applications and when rejecting applicants, we attempt to give personal feedback to every applicant and share why we chose to hire someone else.

Company policies

Our internal policies are aimed at making AppSignal an inclusive space where diversity and responsibility are celebrated and encouraged. To achieve this, we have an unlimited vacation policy: no need to ask for a day off to celebrate your cultural holidays or to take care of your family. This ties in with our flexible working hours policy. Offering flexible working hours means our team has time to go to the gym, have therapy or coaching sessions, or just stop early when they are tired.

We have regular moments for 1-on-1 talks between the individual team members and the management team, and for coaching and feedback sessions. We are also implementing learning and development hours where the team can work on things that might not be directly work-related.

Over the past year we have set up a donation program which gives each employee €500 to donate to a good cause. AppSignal as a company also donates €500 per employee per year to charities, in addition to existing sponsorships and donations.

Lastly, every employee has a personal yearly budget that can be used for anything that makes work life better (coaching, learning, but also things like noise-cancelling headphones).

Code of Conduct

Besides having a code of conduct for our open-source work, we have an internal code of conduct that everone on the team has signed personally. This document outlines how we should treat each other, and documents the processes for when these rules are breached. You can find our job openings on our jobs page.

If you like what you're reading, we'd love for you to take a look at our job openings.