What does tech excellence actually mean at Labyrinth Labs? It’s not about knowing every tool or having all the answers. It’s about curiosity, persistence and the willingness to keep learning. Here’s how that mindset shapes the engineers we hire, the way we work and how we help each other grow.
When we were defining the values of Labyrinth Labs years ago, tech excellence came up immediately. It was already part of how we worked every day, so writing it down felt more like stating the obvious.
It’s one of those phrases that looks great on a website. But if you ask ten engineering companies what it means, you’ll probably get ten different answers. We’ve had plenty of time to work out our own, and it ended up being a lot less about knowledge than we thought it would be.
The easy picture is someone who knows every AWS service, fixes any Kubernetes issue in minutes and always has an answer ready. In our experience, the best engineers have something else in common, and although it might sound a lot less impressive at first, they were usually the first to say they didn’t know something. They just couldn’t leave it at that. They’d read up on it, ask around, try things, break a few of them, and come back the next morning with another idea until it finally clicked.
You can teach someone Kubernetes, Terraform or AWS. Teaching that kind of stubbornness is much harder, and we’ve never managed to teach curiosity to someone who simply doesn’t have it. The tools will change anyway. Whatever we use today will be replaced by something else in a few years, and people who enjoy learning tend to catch up surprisingly fast.
This changed the way we hire. We still care about experience and technical skills, of course. We build production platforms for customers, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. But once someone is past a certain baseline, we’re much more interested in how they think than in how many technologies are listed on their CV. Do they get excited when something finally works? Do they want to know why it works? Can they say “I don’t know” and still keep looking for the answer? That tells us a lot more about where someone will be in two years than their current job title.
Titles in general don’t mean that much to us [unless it's Meme Lord, which is a well-deserved and cherished title 😃]. It happens fairly often that someone who was a senior elsewhere joins us as a junior or mid-level engineer. We’re not trying to be difficult, and we don’t think we’re special. Our expectations are just different, and we’d rather be upfront about that than give out titles nobody can rely on.
Some candidates have even turned down our offer because they didn’t feel ready. They left the interviews thinking about everything they didn’t know yet. If that’s you, you’re in good company. Quite a few of us at Lablabs walked out of our own interview wanting to cry, and we’re still here. 😃 What someone doesn’t know was never what we focused on. We knew exactly what those gaps were, because we’d spent hours going through them together.
What made us want to hire those people was how they approached problems, the questions they asked and how much they enjoyed learning something new, even when it was hard. And there was a real passion for technology behind all of it. The kind of person who reads about a new tool on a Sunday just because they’re curious, or is still thinking about a problem long after the call has ended. That’s very hard to fake in an interview, and it’s not something we know how to teach.
Once you’re in, we don’t leave you to figure everything out alone. Every newcomer spends their first two weeks with us in the office, so they get to know the team in person and there’s always someone nearby when the questions start piling up. After that, you keep working closely with more experienced colleagues, and reviews are where most of the learning happens. We also make time for learning and certifications, because we expect people to grow and that needs actual time in the week.
So if we make you an offer, we’re not saying you already know everything. We’re saying we think you’ll get there, and we’d like to help.
Wanna find out where your potential could take you? See what positions we’ve got open!
