And the "Team" page couldn't be more cliche-laden either.. lots of dogs and of course, "You should also know that we like dogs, office mini-golf, and breakfast burritos."

WTH it's hilarious that the once-harmless-banal-mild-infantilism of odd underdog side projects and garage up-starts has now infested every executive's/investor's mind such that they feel apparent competetive pressure to ensure a quip like the above will be "obligatorily" present. The only reason this sort of stuff was at first inspiring, "human touch", or exhilarating was because it contrasted so starkly with mainstream biz heuristics. No longer, so might as well all drop the pretend bouncy-castle-playground-mentality right now.

I'm one of those that abhors the Playskoolization of professional services (I don't fit in to that culture myself), don't buy into marketing and am not easily moved, but having sat through a ton of sales meetings from vendors that take both the infantile as well as the more traditional "adult" approaches-- the latter always comes across as cold and sterile, like we're just one more sale they need to make quota.

Product viability being equivalent, the decision comes down to "do I want to do business with some hipsters and their dogs, or do I want to do business with the Borg and their lawyers?"

The human approach still works.

I get that (although probably locale-dependent: biz people in my corner of the world rarely perceive each others as "borgs" and frankly also have little reason to =) but my musing here was more towards the inevitable pendulum swing that turns the whole "hipsters-with-dogs" aesthetic is turning into tomorrow's "lame sterile" (ie 2nd-hand, motion-performing) "borgs". =)

I like how this is stuff I "should know." Like something dire might happen if I don't know up front that I'm entering into a collaboration with people who prefer certain pets and food!

Although hold on, it dawns on me that they might be trying to say these are things in the actual workplace, i.e. it's loud and distracting and smells like burrito farts and (most likely unwashed) dogs. If that's the case, I actually do appreciate knowing up front. But even here they're being super vague. "I like dogs" is different from "I bring my dog to work." Is it the one or the other? Even if I wanted to bring my own dog to work, I still have no idea if that's okay. Don't make people guess!

"We specialize in visual code editors and a platform for distributed apps."

Missing from the home page.

I‘d actually like to be called innovator rather than Rockstar, as well as prefer working with innovators than people behaving like Rockstars...

EDIT:

(Besides that, i agree, realizing this was still the n.io thread after posting this, there’s definitely no reason to take this shop seriously...)

Almost, but not quite - based on their fuzzy descriptions, I had a feeling it's a similar area I do research and development in. Turns out I was right, but I had to find actual product documentation to confirm it: "nio is a highly-scalable stream processing engine that allows you to asynchronously process streaming data signals and act on them in real time. nio is the brain of your real-time application, particularly systems that require distributed processing." https://docs.n.io/getting_started/