The Importance of People
I spent my summer working as a Software Engineer at Ninja Van, a regional logistics company for businesses of all sizes across Southeast Asia. In my time at Ninja Van, I worked on a variety of projects, from improving and optimizing microservices, to creating internal tools for us to monitor the performance of our endpoints using a combination of different tools such as Golang, Kibana and the TICK Stack. One of the more exciting projects I worked on was a Java tool for our QA teams (based in Jakarta, Indonesia) to consume and publish high volumes of Kafka messages for load testing — which proved to be extremely useful for their current workflows.
But the purpose of this article isn’t to go into detail about the work that I’ve done in my 12 weeks there, but rather to document the biggest takeaway from it all: the importance of people.
To deliver a great product and great service, you need a team that believes strongly in what they’re doing. Ninja Van advocates a culture of camaraderie in everyone — we share the same belief of striving to be the best at everything we do. You can ask anybody about anything, and they’ll be happy to help. Sometimes, it feels like I joined a group of friends working together to deliver the best delivery service in all of South East Asia.
With an amazing culture at work, amazing things start to happen. People don’t turn up to work anymore — they turn up to make a difference. When work ceases to be mundane, people are motivated to get the job done well, they take ownership of their work, and there’s a shared interest in the idea of the collective. Individual success means little when the team doesn’t succeed.
Everyone was warm and welcoming to new hires — like you would welcoming a new addition to the family. (There was even a long confluence page about how to make sure new hires feel right at home) We kept fit with HIIT, enjoyed hotpot dinners in the middle of the night, and stayed for hours (in the office!) to have a (not-so-friendly) game of Catan / Codenames — it was a lifestyle, the Ninja lifestyle.
I realized that all this wasn’t just a mere coincidence — that things fell into place because someone said so. It was a conscious choice on the part of everyone in the company, right from the top, that the company was only going to go as far as we wanted it to go. Our lives were only as happy as we allowed it to be.
The 12 weeks I spent there flew by. Not surprising given how time flies when you’re having fun. I learnt many amazing things along the way from a group of remarkable people — people so talented and dedicated they inspire me to be better. The inertia and reluctance to leave was immense, I remember vividly my last day showing up at the doorstep of 30 Jalan Kilang Barat. It was extremely hard to say goodbye to a team so closely knit, a team I saw almost everyday for the better part of 3 months. And that’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve taken away from Ninja Van: the importance of people. The importance of a team that makes you excited to go to work everyday, the importance of a team that pushes you to be better everyday.
It was truly a memorable experience.
“The best outcomes come from inspiring people to action.”
I was incredibly blessed to have had an amazing mentor during my time there, a mentor that had clearly read and internalized every word of Julie Zhuo’s amazing book, The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You. A huge shoutout to you, kh!
Ninja Van is hiring! If you’d like to join this amazing team and be a part of this amazing culture, visit https://www.ninjavan.co/en-sg/careers#openings
