Employees

Molten-Labs will have a small set of permanent technical employees, for each of the following departments: Software & Firmware, Hardware, Electronics, Science (including Math) and Manufacturing.  In fact, we are big supporters of STEAM-FM, which stands for "Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math, Finance and Management" ... (yes, management!)

Our choice of these “deep learning” generalist employees is very important – these employees are the rarest of the rare.  They are not employed because they are expert in one particular discipline (although they probably will be), but because they know enough to know when they need more expert input.   We are looking for people with a history of overcoming problems. We are looking for humble people, who can say “I don’t know the best answer to this problem, but I can find someone who does”.  We are hiring our permanent employees to be able to reach out to our network of contract specialists when needed.

A few notes about our generalist permanent employees:

• While they may have a depth of knowledge on a few subjects, they should be broadly knowledgeable in their entire space.  
• They must be excited by the prospect of always being on the lookout for new innovations, processes or procedures in their space.   They must continue to learn, to stay abreast of new technologies and processes.
• To understand the breadth of a problem, break the problem down, determine which elements of the problem can be in-sourced (done within their department), out-sourced to the “specialist” contractors or crowd-sourced. They have to be humble enough to know when their own knowledge base is insufficient.
• Always be searching for new people to add to our network of specialist contractors and be able to tap into them.
• Not suffer from the "Not Invented Here" syndrome, where only their ideas are good enough. 

These personality qualities should be compared to existing Research and Development organisations:

• Generally, they have a deep knowledge in a limited subject area, which is often a double-edged sword.  Such people may not be aware of new technologies or processes that might achieve a better result.
• They are generally not humble, their experience has proven them very capable, which means that they do not reach out to others to broaden the solutions base.
• They are inexperienced with the use of crowdsourcing and prefer to keep everything internal.

While we have directors for each of these significant divisions of the company, we will also have two positions for each project.  They will be the Project Technical Manager and Project Client Manager.  These two different people, with very different skills, work together to see each project come to completion.