Work at 9th - Remote Company

At 9th Designs, we craft software that help small businesses thrive. We are a creative bunch who are picky when creating for others and bodacious when we create for ourselves.

Current Openings

No open positions at this time

Our Team Philosophy

No Meetings, No Deadlines, No "Full-Time" Employees.

Working at 9th resembles playing for a sports team. Team members may have different goals, play different roles, and posess different strengths but we work collaboratively aiming toward a common goal.

We emphasize freedom, not only when it comes to your time but your workflow, creative expression, and location. We work hard to empower team members and provide the freedom, tools, and trust to do the best work of their careers.

We're not for everyone. In broad strokes, Managers of One thrive at 9th. If you consider yourself an eager learner, self starter, a conscientious worker, and a thoughtful, kind, supportive human, you might just have a home here.

Our way of working isn’t for everyone. There are no company retreats or team building activities, and we have limited opportunities for growth beyond your job title. We also can’t compete with the comp packages that big tech companies and organizations can provide.

But we can compete–and win–on flexibility and freedom.

Majority of the time striving professionals have two options: work a full-time job and hustle nights/weekends, or leave your job and risk everything to start the company or pursue your goals.

We offer a third, you can contract 10-35 hours a week, organize your week structure, and design your own hours. This allows you to continue a fulltime job, pursue your personal goals, manage a business, or ensure you're available to your family and other obligations.

The future of work is extinguishing the work-structure "norm", where your career requires you to design your life around it, instead of designing it around your family, friends, and personal pursuits.

It’ll take some getting used to if you’ve been immersed in ASAP culture, but after a while you’ll wonder how you worked any other way.

Who you are

Friendly and thoughtful? Let’s talk.

What we’re not looking for are ideological clones or people who are otherwise just like us. We need free thinkers, opinionated individuals who are their authentic selves and take pride in who they are and the work they do.

It's a given that diversity is a must for us. But it's more than that, diversity has deeper value beyond monetary. There are few better ways to expand your horizons and grow as a person than to put yourself in the company of others with different backgrounds, experiences and identities. So don’t shy away. Come work with us. We’ll do some growing together.

What it’s like to work @9th

A calm, collected environment where you can do your best work.

Working at 9th resembles playing for a sports team. We find members that fit into our style while covering and working to fill a gap in our system. We work collaboratively aiming toward a common goal, each of us, an all star at being ourselves and offering our best creative selves to push forward the products and services 9th provides.

There're limited touch points, we're all working within our own individual areas of the business, focused solely on executing assigned tasks and projects. Most of our communication is through basecamp message boards or chats, documents with feedback, and occasional emails or scheduled Zoom calls. (We aim for any communication that commands someone's immediate attention to be rare. You should aim for that as well when working with colleagues)

You have to write, and you have to write well. Not in the sense of perfect grammar or writing conventions. But in expression, you shouldn't always need a meeting or a phone call to express your thoughts and to communicate with colleagues. Compiling and articulating your thoughts in a well written form is hard. That's exactly why we require it. We want you to be heard, but we all need to be thoughtful. If you have a suggestion, provide some research and references within it. If you have a question, provide the previous steps you've taken in your attempt to address the issue.

What does a typical work week & day feel like

Manager of One.

We have an “anti-overtime” rate: past 35 hours a week, people can continue to work at an hourly rate of 50 percent. This allows us to have a high hourly rate for the highest leverage work and also allows people to work more per week if they wish. We're stricter on how this is tracked, but also aware of the tasks and projects we're working on. Usually these situations reflect in a monthly or quarter bonus, it always comes down to the situation and the active phase and work of the company.

Individual cadence (weekly)

We don't care when you work, how you work, or where you work. As long as tasks and work is getting complete with the quality, thoughtfulness, and care we all expect. Then we're happy.

We recommend a weekly flow like this to get your work done and stay roughly in sync with everyone else (though to be clear, we require zero synchronous communication).

- Do all work that is blocking other folks. This mostly includes:

- Review open tasks assigned to you

- Address any outstanding questions in Basecamp message boards

- Look at open issues and tasks listed in your respective's team queue

- If you're running out of work, add some tasks that you see that needs to be addressed. Or complete some research and provide opinions, feature ideas, or methods around how we can better compete with our peers and competitors.

- Try to tackle 1 broad task a week, (including all of the small tasks associated, for example, updating a page's copy or improving the user experience of a landing page.)

- Provide a weekly update in the company's main message board in Basecamp. Outlining some of the work you've completed, experiments you're running, or outlining your thoughts on the general work week, metrics you've found, or feedback on how the team and company can improve as a whole.

- Resume ongoing tasks or projects.

Organizational structure - Employee Types

Everyone employed at 9th, work on a per contract basis. Even the founders.

Compensation, responsibilities, and role is determined on a per contract basis. Meaning we don’t have an established rate for any role. Too many variables come into play in the position's value to the company. Including but not limited to the candidate’s talents and skills, experience, and the overall responsibilities and duties of the job. In essence, everything can be negotiated.

The expiration terms categorizes our employee contracts. We have two types, expiry date and projects.

Expiry date
For "full-time" roles, members are usually signed to a contract that is greater than or equal to a year and work around 35 hours a week. The expiration date of the contract represents the "reviewal and renewal period", where management and members agree on salary rate, role responsibilities, and other details to execute a new contract.

During the contract discussions we'll settle on:

Weekly hours
Hourly/Salary rate
Payment schedule
The duration of the contract until it expires and rate is renegogiated
Availability schedule
Start date

Projects
For part-time roles, members are usually signed to a contract with a focus on producing deliverables. Meaning, the contract will list several deliverables that represent the “project”.

During the contract discussions we'll settle on

Start date
Rate for deliverables
Timeline for deliverables
Terms for deliverables
Payment schedule

Interview process

Typically the process looks like this.

1. Apply via the available form and complete intro call if contacted.

2. An unpaid, 1 hour challenge, that resembles the type of task we would need you to solve. This may include improving the design of a module like a form, planning the schema and technical specs associated with a small feature, or writing up a new help center article.

3. A paid, few-week trial period, that resembles the day-to-day work you'll do at 9th. This may include fixing bugs, shipping a feature, or answering support tickets. This can usually be done on the side or on the weekends, and will take less than 10 hours a week to complete.

4. Offer letter and contract finalization.

5. Official onboarding

What benefits do I get

Company provided benefits are a work in progress.

We currently provide the following benefits.

- Nine official paid American recognized holidays. (New Year's Day, Martin Luther King Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, Day after Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day)
- Two paid personal holidays that are associated with your culture, religion, political beliefs, etc.. (Used at your discretion)
- 112 hours of paid sick time per year. (Used at your discretion)
- 112 hours of paid vacation time per year. (Remaining hours can be paid out as a yearly bonus or roll over in a contract renewal)