Celebrating Agent 00100 milestone

One of the things I underestimated when starting Test Double was how important it is to have a meaningful purpose for the business and a vision for achieving it. If you have no purpose, your people will inevitably show up for a paycheck and when the next better offer comes along, seek those greener pastures.

Purpose

At Test Double, we’re constantly trying to pull people into our virtual office who believe the software development industry is broken—so that we can help improve it, one person, project, codebase, and client at a time. In this sense, our mission is our compass. It ultimately guides what we do at a very high level.

Equally important is the company’s stated vision. It is ideally a 5-10 year view of how the business will evolve while still pursuing its mission. Our vision helps the team see what is coming and align their goals and aspirations with those of the company. It signals to everyone what they should expect as the company progresses and improves.

Growth

Almost six years ago, I stood in front of the 20 or fewer double agents at the time and outlined our vision of growth, one aspect of which was hiring our 100th employee by January 2026.

Today, we’re excited to welcome Jaquel Rogers Robertson as Agent #00100! Jaquel is joining as Operations Coordinator, and helps us turn the page on this goal a few years early. Sorry, no fruit basket or yearly supply of donuts or anything for being the 100th person through our doors.

As we look back on achieving this milestone of our vision, it’s interesting to see how updates to our vision have consistently centered around one thing—our people. We believe that great software is built by great teams. Rarely is the software the actual issue, it’s always the people behind the keyboards who are the barometer for success.

People

As a services-based business, we are nothing without our people. Test Double as an organization cannot succeed without hiring and supporting as many awesome humans as possible. Further, we’ll only ever have a miniscule impact on our industry if we’re a 20-person consultancy. So we are always trying to grow without sacrificing the culture our team has come to appreciate.

Our current vision outlines that we’re going to scale to 150 active employees so we can have a broad impact on our industry. We’re going to solve a more diverse set of challenges facing our clients so we can have a deeper impact on the businesses that we’re fortunate enough to work with. Further, our vision states we’re going to become a more diverse team of humans at Test Double so we can be better equipped to solve the myriad of challenges presented by our clients, and so we can be an example for other companies in our industry to follow.

Impact

Nowhere in this vision is a statement about revenue or profits. Believe me, we understand that these things are important, but they aren’t what motivates us. They are a very lagging indicator of whether we’re running a business that can sustainably continue. What motivates us is the idea of bringing more talented, diverse, and awesome humans into our midst, so we can have a more lasting impact on this broken industry of software development.

At times we have referred to our recruiting efforts as a developer rescue operation, and I think it still fits. We provide opportunities for software engineers to solve challenging problems, grow in their careers, do so in a balanced work week, and eventually reap the rewards of their efforts via ownership within the company. If this aligns with your goals and aspirations, we’d love for you to apply here and help us fix what’s broken in software.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer up our gratitude for all of the current and former double agents who have made Test Double such an amazing place to work. Please know that your contributions have helped shape our company and enabled us to evolve and improve over the last 10 years. A sincere thank you to the first 100: