Although I am not qualified enough for such a position I am curious what requirements they have. I check your link and they ask for at least 2 years of experience. Is that "all" ?

As a CS drop out I can't even provide bachelor's degree. The point I am trying to make is: As far as I know here in Germany employees always ask for degrees. Am I way off?

Could I train myself the necessary skills and then work my way up and then some day I'd be qualified enough to work for a company like Ableton?

To sum it up: I don't give a rats ass for any degrees. I don't even have one myself. We send applicants a programming test. I get these tests, and I assess them without even skimming the CV. Because it would otherwise just skew my observations.

If the test convinced me that you can code, you will have a job-interview, via phone or in person depending on if it's feasible to fly you in to Berlin or not.

This interview is pure technical, either.

If this convinced me that you are a good coder, I will arrange a third interview with the CTO, who has the final say on all employments. I won't spoil the enjoyment of that for you :)

I've been into electronic music production & sounddesign for about 8 years now. But I never saw a way that this could somehow be helpful when it comes to finding a job.

Two terms of CS gave me some insight into programming but I mainly solved little mathematical problems rather than gaining insight into "real world software programming".

Now I am attending business school and try to figure out how to avoid a typical office job so that I can do something more rewarding, where I can be somewhat more myself, instead.

I should seriously get into programming in my spare time...

Sorry to everyone else for hijacking this thread. ;-)

€: just finished the video. Looks like an awesome working atmosphere indeed!

1. I have left university 13 months ago and have worked for an online shopping company in Berlin ever since. I have done freelance development as a student, so is the 2 years experience an absolute must?

2. The hiring page is in English but would you like a German-style application (photo, lots and lots of certificates and grades) or the much shorter Anglicized version (3 pages max).

Regarding the CV: give us whatever you have. I personally won't read it, eventually somebody in HR might - but it's not used to filter applications.

The other day we even looked at a 20-year old highschool student, because he looked promising. Neither CV nor experience. We didn't take him for a bunch of reasons, but that's another story.

We also offer german-courses for employees. And english for the germans ;)

The defined API for interacting with Live is Max For Live. Python is only used internally, and to a limited extend.

And for The Bridge, we introduced an XML-based document format, which should be a second option to generate live-sets.

Agree with Mary - Berlin is a fantastic place to live and very affordable in many areas. Great city with a growing start-up scene!

Down in the south (Stuttgart), it's all C or Java and most projects seem to be boring on the first look :-/

But the web-team is large enough to also offer more back-end related work, which is the reason we advertise Python-developers instead of Web-developers only.

I fear though that this is not really that much different from another spin on social networking in the end.

I guess this is unavoidable in just about any web development job these days but at least the context is a little more intrinsically interesting at Ableton. At least to me.