I am a software engineer and I also have a role in planning workflow and scheduling. I am often managing client expectations – prioritising, fixing issues and making sure we deal with the most important things first. As software engineers we’re all trained across the board on the different client projects and technologies that we use. This means we don’t get silo’d and it never gets boring. It keeps it interesting and fun. We share different projects so there’s flexibility and we can work on things that suit our skills and we’re interested in.
The company culture is that happy people are better people. We work in a relaxed environment, there is no strict management hierarchy. There is lots of responsibility on every member of staff to maintain their own standards and hard work. It’s unusual to be in a team where everyone cares so much about the quality of what they do and doesn’t need a manager breathing down their neck to get things done.
We’re quite social and we enjoy ourselves. Very competitive bowling; networking pub quiz event for coders; hack days, for example. We’ve hosted LAN parties, ten geeks in a room playing PC games all night long. Earlier this year I flew to San Francisco for the regional finals of the Paypal coding competition. I’d like to enter a illumo digital team next time. This ‘outside’ stuff is for finding things you’ve not yet used in your work, trying out languages you haven’t used before and can use another time. It’s huge fun too.
I enjoy it. I love the company. The people here are fantastic, relaxed. Elsewhere it can be quite stressful but here it’s fun and there are good projects to work on.
