Observations of a Junior Switching From Platform to Product
In this post, we are learning about Neslihan’s experiences on different engineering teams and how engineering management shaped her decision on her next step in her career throughout the way.
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I joined Maze in December 2021 as a Junior Software Engineer. Having only started learning software engineering earlier that year, it was important for me to find a company that would help me grow and take a vested interest in building my abilities. This post is going to look at my first year in the role and how Maze gave the freedom to move between teams in order to broaden my experience.
Engineering teams at Maze are composed of two main groups: Platform and Product teams. DevX is a part of the Platform Team with an aim of making the Product Team feel happy and satisfied when planning, writing, running, testing, deploying, and rolling back the code.
When I joined DevX it was a relatively new pod led by Thomas Groutars and we were just setting up the foundations. For the following 10 months our focus centered around improving the mono-repo and the tooling around it with a final aim of Continuous Delivery.
At DevX, I got a chance to get involved in tasks such as;
- Invalidating environment variables across the environments as configs using envalid
- Splitting major folders into parts for faster and more granular deployments
- Centralising and improving the event system using an event bus and Segment
- Setting up the initial phase of Continuous Deployment using CircleCI
It took several RFCs and documentations to educate the people on all of the improvements we did. And by the late July we managed to release the first phase of Continuous Deployment for the team’s usage.
We reduced the deployment time from hours to minutes and increased the release frequency from twice a week to on-demand. That’s huge!
Besides these, we focused on our communication with the rest of the developers as their ideas were a crucial part of our mission. We created a Panel meeting and did regular surveys to create action items for ourselves according to the needs of the team.
Along with my contribution on the DevX team, I also did 2 secondments at Usability Testing Pod from the Product Team.
- First one was a month before releasing Clips. I observed how the team efficiently operated with the Support team, PMs, and Designers.
- The second one was the ideation process of Live Website Testing. It was such a creative environment amongst the team where everybody was free to experiment on a solution with POCs.
I was there, not only to contribute but also to gain insights for DevX and to find what software engineering means to me.
I was enjoying my secondment to the Product Team but up to this point the move was only meant to be temporary. In May, Thomas saw that I had the potential to grow even further by a permanent move and, unprompted, he asked me a question that had been at the back of my mind, “Hey Nes, do you think you would benefit more from a Product team?”
I was amazed by how the engineering managers and the lead of my team made their observations, thought switching teams might be the best next-step for my career and made the offer to me. I jumped at the challenge.
Around mid October, I was a new member of Tester Management Pod (TRM)!
Today, as a product engineer, I spend at least 2-3 hours with our PM and Designer in a week. In the light of our company values, we actively analyze research results, investigate solutions, make design decisions together and collaborate with the Support team to better identify the pain points in our products (Reach database and Panel for tester recruitment).
The problems we’re solving are, by nature, fundamentally different than the ones in Platform. At the Platform team, we were dealing with scalability, maintainability and reliability which defines the overall quality of the infra-structure and security, whereas in the Product, we’re working so hard to make every experience not good but delightful using constant user feedback and brain-storming.
As soon as I joined TRM Pod I noticed that I needed to brush up my product development skills. As Tiago (our EM) directly reminded me Maze offers a yearly bonus of $500 on personal improvement! But for me what makes it even more precious is that the perk includes dedicating a block of time to self-improvement within the work hours. That was exactly what I was looking for!
This is all possible because of the culture at Maze.
As an early-career engineer and the only Junior Engineer at Maze, I felt cared-for and appreciated by my team as they themselves offered me this opportunity to explore both aspects of modern day engineering in Product and Platform teams. I believe this move will contribute immensely to my perspective for the rest of my career both as a great example of management and a technical exploration of problems present in both fields.
I have to say that Maze’s culture is super healthy and supportive that it lets me grow in every direction I want to see myself in the future. And it covers outside of work as well. At this very same year I got married, changed the country I lived, dealt with health issues, traveled to many places and did a lot of work for the software community I run. This is all possible because of Maze’s culture.
All the credits of this beautiful journey goes to DevX Team Lead Thomas Groutars, the Engineering Managers involved Tiago Pombeiro, Harvey Johal, Georgy Devyatkin and of course our VP of Engineering Morgan Bruce! You rock!
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