A contentious topic in our office, we've taken to asking it in interviews. Turns out that there is absolutely no correlation between Pop-Tart toasting and being a talented engineer. We've also found absolutely no correlation between what school you went to, what degrees you have, how many acronyms you know, how many years of experience you have, or pretty much anything else that you find in most of the job ads here on craigslist. All those things tell you is how much on-the-job training a candidate will need.

At Ooga Labs, our philosophy is that we can't teach talent. We won't teach you how to program either - but, pretty much everything else is fair game. Ruby on Rails, how to scale, how to run a business - these are things that we can teach, or that you can learn given the chance. However, we must start with talent - we need to believe that our investment in time is going to be worth it in the end.

One of the best ways for you to get a feel for our company, and decide if it would be a good place for you, is to talk to someone who currently works here. Hence, we've created a Facebook Connect application that will allow you to see if any of your friends, or friends of friends, work at Ooga Labs. Find it at http://oogalabs.com/applicants/new

We also plan to add more information to our website, as part of a site redesign. Currently we're brainstorming on a few different designs- once we decide, we should have all sorts of good information up there.

In the meantime, a short blurb about us. We are an internal incubator. Just like venture capitalists like to build up a portfolio of companies, to spread the risk and try to hit the home run, we do the same. We currently have three companies out there - WonderHill, Medpedia, and PlacePop. We have one more in private beta right now. The management team sold their previous company for $100 million.

We sit in an open office, and maintain a flat structure. Everyone spends time with either the CEO, CTO, or CCO (Chief Creative Officer). We want to be able to give people a task, and say "Make it happen." Consequently, we give everyone a lot of responsibility, and expect to see good judgment.

We ask our engineers to do as much of the stack as possible. If they can do design and/or product, even better. Engineers develop on OS X, production lives on Linux. Most of our sites are Ruby on Rails on top of MySQL, with a healthy dash of memcached. We have problems of scaling (a billion dynamic requests a month), and problems of starting (how to drive traffic to brand new sites that we launch). We would be considered an Agile shop, but do not follow any specific methodology.

Personality is important to us. We want to make sure that people like to play video games with each other (we have Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii), or drink a beer together (fully stocked beer fridge). There's also the dart board, but that doesn't see so much love these days.

If you're interested, great - send us an email. If you're not, we wish you luck in your search - and feel free to change your mind. :)

• Compensation: salary, benefits, EQUITY, fully stocked kitchen, beer budget
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.