Greetings!
My name is Fabian and I WAS a software engineer at Truecaller since 100 days when I wrote this.
Context
This text has for a long time been sitting dead with a bunch of drafts. I'm now returning those back to life since I think there's some value in making it public.
When writing it, I had worked at Truecaller for 100 days and it was fairly fresh in my memory both the onboarding process and the interview, but I had also gotten fairly well into the team and could talk about the day-to-day work as well.
I'll actually do it backwards. Allons-y?
NOTE: Everything you read from this point onwards was written in 2015. So: "I am" is in fact "2015 I was".
The job
Officially I'm employed as a "Software Engineer". What that means in real life... Is very different from every other Software Engineer at the company.
Some days I feel that I know exactly what I'm doing, and others... Well, you've already seen the picture :P
Let's just simply talk about some of the fun stuff I do!
So what I guess is the "normal" workday stuff could be seen as writing code, fixing bugs and creating features. But this involves so much more fun stuff, for example. Let's say we have a very tricky bug that needs to be squashed, or an interesting feature that I (you guessed it) have no idea of how to implement. Then the fun begins! It usually involves a whiteboard, 2-3 more people and discussions :D
And at times my work goes completely away from that! Sometimes my work includes playing around with kids on Saturdays, sometimes it involves talking about life as a junior and sometimes I'm a ghost...
Me (as ghost) and two of my colleagues
Onboarding
Well, we have this onboarding thingy here at Truecaller.
Or actually, we have two onboardings. One with the team, and one with the company. Something that I think was really clever. During the onboarding we got to meet lots of cool people from all the different parts of the company.
But...
You see, the onboarding didn't confine us to just knowing about the stuff we need to know. But we actually learn about each and every part of the company. Including how the data team works, how the support team works and what it is that the business developers do during their days.
It took two full days, but I think it was a fantastic onboarding experience where we really got to know the company and how it functions.
We also had some social media training, which I think was the most brilliant part. There we were taught how Truecaller communicates through it's official social channels, and how we could help in doing that. How we as employees could join in and be a voice for the company. Be a part of the company.
Interviews
I've never had this fun at an interview before!
Granted, I've only been to a few, but this was definitely the best one. I can't really put the word on exactly why, but it was fun, interesting and really challenging!
I really didn't think I'd get the job. But then... I did!
Tips and tricks
Everything I've learnt has basically gone down to the simplest of things. That is:
AND
