The reality of life as a software engineer can vary greatly depending on the company you work for. Software engineering job ads and careers pages may sell companies with their best foot forward, but the reality of working in that company might not turn out as expected.
At 91导航, transparency is part of who we are. Rather than us just telling you what engineering at 91导航 is like, we鈥檝e got two of our talented engineers, Catherine Bacon and Matt Guy, on hand to give their perspectives.
Q: What鈥檚 it like being an engineer at 91导航?
A: Catherine
鈥�91导航 is a supportive and collaborative place to work as an engineer. You鈥檙e surrounded by people who want to do a good job and are eager and willing to talk to you.
Each day is really varied. You might be working on a large feature, fixing a bug, releasing the app, speaking to a user, helping our customer success or sales team with a technical issue, or answering questions. I really like this way of working, as you鈥檙e not just a coding monkey stuck in a room! You see what you鈥檙e working on being used in real time, making a difference to users and helping their release processes.鈥�
A: Matt
鈥淎t 91导航 you鈥檙e surrounded by intelligent people that care about the quality of the work they produce and the toolset we鈥檙e building for our customers. The engineers here empower each other鈥檚 learning and encourage pragmatism in the technical decisions and developments we carry out. Ultimately, at the heart of our engineering team is a group of fantastic people that I love to work with every single day.鈥�
Q: What makes engineering at 91导航 different from other companies?
A: Catherine
鈥淭here鈥檚 a brilliant balance between being able to approach your work in the way you think best, and colleagues being eager to work with you or help you out when you need it.
I also love that I鈥檓 involved with writing features from their inception, planning the work, and finally releasing them into the wild. It鈥檚 very satisfying to work on something that genuinely makes our users鈥� jobs easier.鈥�
A: Matt
鈥淎t 91导航 we have full ownership of the features we build. We can touch and impact every single layer of the tech stack if we want to, and have regular contact with customers to gain vital context and feedback to help us build the right solutions. This transparency and frequent contact with our customers helps direct our product development and gives us the chance to collaborate with plenty of other teams at 91导航, which is fantastic!鈥�
Q: How do you feel we live up to our engineering values at 91导航?
A: Catherine
鈥淕ood vs perfect: It鈥檚 really easy to get bogged down in imagining version 10, when getting version 1 in front of users to get feedback makes sure it solves the users problem and is much better. There have been times when I鈥檝e fixed a bug in a quick way to unblock a user, and then gone back and implemented a more thought out, robust solution after.
Take ownership: I鈥檝e spoken to customers to work out what I need to build. Planned my work, written it, and fixed bugs. You can see your contribution really clearly, and where your work fits into the bigger picture.
Reject process for process sake: 91导航 has grown from 12 people to 170+ since I joined. As you can imagine, that鈥檚 a lot of change. We鈥檝e needed to introduce a few new structures and processes over time, but there鈥檚 such a willingness to try something and no fear about changing if it doesn鈥檛 work.鈥�
A: Matt
鈥淲e鈥檙e very proud of our speed of delivery in the engineering team at 91导航. We release the latest version of the product multiple times a day and have the flexibility to easily roll back if there are issues.
As much as this is a credit to the automation practices we have in place at 91导航, this release frequency wouldn鈥檛 be possible without thinking about how we structure our code changes and the way that we write our code. We have a principle here of: 鈥榃e release good now, rather than perfect later鈥�, which drives the concept of delivering in small, but impactful, releasable chunks.鈥�
Q: And, finally, the burning question: tabs or spaces?
A: Catherine
鈥沦辫补肠别蝉!鈥�
A: Matt
鈥淭abs all day!鈥�
Eager to have your own engineering impact at 91导航? Apply now.