hi

Since this blog (and honestly our company) is new to the world, I wanted to put something out there that explains who we are. This will just quickly go into what hi finance is, what we are about, and then will zero in on specifically our engineering team values.

We are hiring, and I hope this post will inspire even more people to want to join the cause! hi finance is a (cliche incoming!) rocket ship we are building while it’s flying. We are looking for people who want to dig in and build with us.

Anyways my dear reader, let’s get into it.

hi valued hi values

I think it’s best to start really zoomed out, and then zero-in on different pillars of our culture and vision. So, first things first. What is hi finance about?

We are trying to build the most-trusted, human-first financial institution that specifically serves Canada’s next generation. We believe a bank should work for you. It should be structured around giving good financial advice and it shouldn’t take advantage of its customers.

In the next 5 years we will become the go-to bank for all Canadian post-secondary students. We will do this by building a financial institution and brand that you can trust, and by building tools that people actually want to use to work on their money. We help students figure out how to pay for school, set up a student budget, save money where it counts, and get everything set up to have great momentum when entering their early career.

To do this, we are building our company on 3 value pillars:

Transparency

The first value is Transparency. We will be transparent in all things we do. We have clear pricing, clear value for our clients, a clear mission, and we communicate clearly. Transparency is how we operate, how we earn trust, and how we differentiate ourselves from a broken industry.

Altruism

We believe financial services should exist to help people, not exploit them. We’re rebuilding finance to deliver better outcomes for the next generation. We are client first, always.

Human Ingenuity (HI)

(that’s not actually what hi stands for but it’s a good joke)

We combine AI automation with human insight to maximize the impact of our team. Human Ingenuity is how we operate: blending technology with people-first thinking to drive efficiency, creativity, and meaningful outcomes.

Engineering Values

Now the real meat of it. What is our engineering culture like? How do we plan to build this bank we are fantasizing about? Is it something you should join?

Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast

The most important thing to an engineering team is maintaining velocity. We do this not by moving quickly now, but by moving slowly and aggregating speed over a long time horizon. We can ship fast because we take our time and don’t ship broken things.

We believe that the often used “speed vs quality” dichotomy is false. In fact: quality is speed. If we build high quality things today, then tomorrow we can build more high quality things (rather than spending time maintaining or re-building the old things).

Development Driven Development

It’s a goofy name, with an even goofier initialism: DDD, but it’s very important to how work gets done here at hi. DDD basically means: We build to learn. We don’t spend a crazy amount of time on the drawing board, or in design documents, or over-thinking our approach. The best way to engineer any system is to try something, learn everything we can, and then try something new.

We believe there isn’t much value in over-designing before you ship the first version. The big reason for this is that before you have something in your customer’s hands, you really don’t know much information yet. You will learn so much more about what your customer wants if you ship quickly, than if you spend too much time stressing and over-analyzing.

This also means that we are not afraid to delete things we’ve built and start over. DDD means we will get things wrong, often, in fact if we aren’t getting things wrong 70% of the time, we aren’t doing something right. We should aim to iterate quickly and kill-our-babies (metaphorically, let me emphasize: we do not kill real babies).

Oh and I guess that reminds me of one last important piece of DDD. Iterate FAST and when I say FAST I mean FAST. Iteration loops are not measured in months, weeks or days. They are measured in hours and minutes. If the tools aren’t allowing us to move this quickly, then we fix the tools so we can move faster.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t contrast with pillar one (slow is smooth and smooth is fast) in fact they are necessary components of one another. The only way to build things of high quality is to ship fast, and the only way to ship fast is to have built things of high quality.

(the name is like a joke about TDD, which makes it sound like we don’t do TDD but actually we are really big believers in TDD because of value #1 slow is smooth and smooth is fast)

Never be blocked

Lastly but not leastly is Never be blocked, or NBB for short. This value is very tied to DDD but it’s important enough to call it out on its own.

We don’t believe in blocks. We don’t wait for others to get started, we don’t spend too much time worrying that we don’t know something. We build, we change, we move. We happen to the world, the world doesn’t happen to us.

We are obsessed with making great things, to do that we often have to work our way around things in our way. Sometimes our integration partners are slow, so we push them to speed up (or we just do their job for them, or we cut them out of the process). Sometimes the functionality we need just isn’t in the library, so we build it ourselves. We do whatever it takes to get the job done and we don’t let not knowing something stop us.

We are hi-ring

We are hi-ring for a Founding Engineer. We aren’t necessarily looking for someone who matches our values exactly (we are open to change!) but at least people who resonate with some of these. If you are interested in building the future of finance please reach out! My email is mike@hifinance.ca

If you want to skip the pre-amble. We have a public coding challenge that is the first step in our hiring process, you can find that here: github.com/hi-engineering/hi-interview