By Gavin Roush, Recruiting Consultant, Writer and Star Wars & Other Great Films Expert | March 17, 2021
After being politely asked to write a blog which encapsulates our hiring ambitions in Finland, the guidelines provided to me were simply ‘this should be a tool to excite people, to combine plan of products with recruitment plan. Ready, Go’.
Wait, so am I the tool? Or more specifically, ‘a’ tool? What the! All those years ago back on the playground in my ho-dunk woodsy town in upstate NY….I always thought by choosing to play Luke instead of Vader during recess, that I was setting my future up for success to <avoid> being a tool! (but then the complicated storyline that the bad guy was the good guy’s Dad, yikes, let’s get into that another time. Force Awakens was the best Star Wars film btw, and this is undisputed).
So let’s cut to the chase: Basemark is already a collection of 60 or so highly talented, cool as cucumber software engineers, designers, graphics creators, visionaries, inventors and technical ‘philosophers’. The cerebral power alone could fuel a small city, and considering that we are mostly working from home these days, our virtual set up works, and works well. As everyone knows today, shaping and propelling a company culture is pretty tough to do virtually! Ours is unique.
Our core business and future pathway for success and essentially world domination, revolves around the booming automotive sector. Fortunately, we have all the best ingredients to make this work, to support our unique culture and priority on talent. We have money in the bank, we have customers who already trust us, we have the tech, we have the talent, and we have a future ahead of us in automotive that no one else seems to be able to compete head to head with us.
So how is our culture unique when we are sitting in our underwear in our makeshift home office wearing our headsets and taking part in two or three chats at once near our terminal which is riddled with code and booming on our other screen with the most insane graphics you have ever seen?
‘If you Build it, they will come’ is quite the late 80s movie line that explains how we have shaped our culture of brain power and coolness. Thanks to our founder and his first team of talent, we have positioned ourselves at the crossroads of automotive, graphics purity and footprint ‘miniaturity’. We can pack a massive graphics punch in a small amount of space for car companies while simultaneously paving critical software attention for autonomous drive. And its this intersection of tech that has lured all 60 of us together. The result: our day to day is a joy. We don’t hire just anyone mind you! We have prioritized personality and heart over others. We look for ‘magic’, and we find it. Our cohesive element is solid, there is love between us, which drives us and keeps us joyous, and productive. This is our unique culture.
Lest I get too emotional here, let’s talk about our future! It’s called: Rocksolid. Rocksolid is the fastest embedded graphics rendering engine for automotive. It’s cross platform, its API agnostic, its optimized for a small memory footprint and fast start-up times, ideal for automotive real-time SoCs. And above all its pure graphics, pure superior graphics. Pure superior beauteous graphics! *but its not commercial yet!
Almost though! Every month we are releasing updates to our SDK and Runtime, giving people the opportunity to share feedback with us. We then clean up and optimize and packetize for the next iteration, ultimately so that it will be ready, and is as pure as the driven Finnish snow (which continues to fall in Finland while other country’s blossoming Spring time gives them opportunities to wear bikinis and sip margaritas outside in the sun etc). (for the record, Finns also still sip margaritas in bikinis aggressively when it snows).
So, what’s the competition? This is actually difficult to hypothesize. First there are a couple popular ones, Unity and Unreal. But in actuality they are gaming engines and we are smaller and faster and tailor made for automotive. And then there are one or two others, but they are too expensive and too slow and not worth naming (no offense, this is according to customers who use them and complain about this). So ultimately we are left with a real market opportunity. We can disrupt on both pricing and performance. In terms of tech, we have fast Vulkan API implementation! And based on our own benchmarking expertise, we offer superior supporting performance, even legacy APIs like OpenGL ES (which makes the author feel old that we consider OpenGL ES as ‘legacy’, sigh…).
Generally and awesomely speaking, we have the modern APIs and Tech, which is one of the reasons top talent in Finland is flocking to us! Because they actually get to work on what many software companies promise: work on the latest and greatest. Vulkan API? We are one of the rare ones mastering this. Ray tracing, oh yeah. Compute, hardcore graphics, machine vision, neural network inferencing, this is what we eat for breakfast.
So, what’s next for us? This is the question our technical leaders have been asking one another (and themselves at night), for months. This, ladies and gentlemen, is not something I am prepared to reveal today! But boy oh boy is it big… Let’s save that for another time.
My advice to you? Follow us, Like us, Bookmark us, or then go ahead and send us your CV if you are a tech genius already, or if you plan on being one when you grow up. We will be hiring a LOT of talent in the coming months. You too can join our collective cerebral unique cohesive element, and then try to disagree with me about why TENET was the greatest film Hollywood has released in years..
