SPUG: SPUG (Re-)Introduction / Job Posting

[Kevin Fink]

I'd like to introduce (or re-introduce) myself and WhitePages.com to the 
SPUG community. As some of you may recall, I was first involved in SPUG 
back in the mid-to-late '90s while I was at N2H2. We hosted the SPUG 
meetings in the Bank of California building and I had a fair number of 
SPUG members on my Dev team there. I haven't been involved much in SPUG 
since 2001 or so - I went off to work in the Java world for a bit. I've 
been working at WhitePages.com for 2 1/2 years now (as SVP Engineering / 
CTO - same role as at N2H2) and am just now "coming up for air" 
sufficiently to start to come back to the community.

WhitePages.com is a great company and we're growing rapidly, so I thought 
I'd give everyone a bit of information about what we're doing and how we 
go about doing it, in the hopes of interesting you and/or your friends in 
joining us.

The functionality behind the www.whitepages.com website has existed since 
about 1997, but didn't turn into a real business until about 2000. We are 
privately held and have been profitable since inception, so we have no 
debt (either in terms of money or influence by outside investors or VCs). 
We have grown rapidly over the past several years - roughly doubling in 
size, revenue, and profits each year. We currently have about 70 
employees, and are looking to grow to around 100 by the end of 2005 - we 
have somewhere in the vicinity of 20 open positions right now.

We are primarily an Open Source shop, although we are definitely more 
concerned with finding the right tool for the job than "religion". We 
primarily develop in Perl, which runs within mod_perl on Apache on Linux, 
with backend databases on Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL (all on Linux). 
Our middleware generates XML and we transform that with XSLT for our 
websites. We also consume a fair bit of XML, primarily from data feeds 
that we subscribe to.

Our profitability and growth rate coupled with our small size and flexible 
technology attitude provide a solid foundation for an excellent corporate 
culture. We're nimble and responsive (for example, we release code every 
week) without the "everpresent fear of impending doom" that often 
accompanies a young company. We pride ourselves on open communication and 
universal recognition - we have all-staff meetings every week where a lot 
of detail about what each group is doing is shared, and we work hard to 
make sure that everyone knows what we're all working on and why, as well 
as what has been accomplished.

We have a great team now, with some names you just might recognize, and 
would like to continue to grow that team. Our full list of open positions 
is listed on our corporate website:

http://www.whitepagesinc.com/jobs

On the technology side, we have positions open in both Quality Assurance 
(including a Quality Assurance Manager, where we're looking for someone 
with Perl knowledge in addition to QA and Management experience) and 
Development (with a variety of positions open, all involving a great deal 
of Perl).

We're located in downtown Seattle (16th floor of the Rainier Tower) and 
are looking for full-time, permanent, on-site employees only. (We will let 
you go home on every third Thursday to shower... :-)

Kevin Fink
SVP Engineering / CTO
WhitePages.com, Inc.
kfink at whitepages.com