Arcwell welcomes five new engineers as the studio grows
This spring we welcomed five new colleagues to Arcwell, bringing the studio to eighteen people. It is the most we have grown in a single year, and we have done it carefully — the way we try to do everything.
Growth is a strange thing for a studio like ours. The whole reason Arcwell exists is that small, senior teams build better software than large ones. Every new person is a deliberate decision, weighed against the risk of becoming the kind of place we set out not to be. We would rather turn away good work than hire in a hurry and lose the close, accountable way of working that our clients rely on.
Who has joined
Three of our new colleagues have joined the web platform team, where demand has been steady for customer portals and internal operations tools. One has joined the cloud practice, strengthening our ability to support clients who run substantial workloads and need someone watching them around the clock. And one has joined the data team, which has grown from a side activity into a core part of what we do.
Each of them came to us as an experienced engineer. That is not an accident. We do not have a large junior tier for senior people to delegate to; instead, the person who designs a system is usually the person who builds and looks after it. New joiners spend their first weeks pairing with the rest of the team, reading our written records of past decisions, and getting to know the codebases they will help care for.
Keeping the studio small in spirit
Eighteen people is still a small company, and we intend to keep it feeling that way. We continue to take on a deliberately limited number of projects at a time, so that each one gets a senior engineer who is genuinely accountable for it. Our internal rule of thumb has not changed: if growth would mean a client could no longer get a straight answer from the person doing the work, then it is growth we do not want.
We are grateful to the clients whose continued trust has made this possible, and we are looking forward to introducing our new colleagues over the coming months. If you have worked with us before, you may well meet one of them on your next call.
Published by the Arcwell Systems team. Have a question about anything in this article? Get in touch — we're happy to talk.