Daily life of a Software Developer in National University of Singapore
Are you a student in NUS/NTU ? Or Do you plan to work in NUS IT? Do you wish to know how software developers in NUS working ? If so, you are coming to the right place.
Before diving into life of a software developer in NUS, allow me to introduce myself.
I have graduated from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in 2014. Starting from that time, I have been working for Changi Airport, SMRT and also working in DBS Bank. Areas that I am working on is quite vast ranging from iOS, Android, Backend and even data analytics using data studio from google and many others. I am trying to be real full stack developer. The area that I haven’t explored is DevOps and others.
As a developer, sometimes we need to work till 6am. Last time, when I was working on Changi Wifi Project, our whole team is working all night long so that it doesn’t have much impact on users.
Every company will have their own unique culture.
It should be enough about me I guess.
NUS has flexible working hour. Staff can choose 8am -5:30pm, 8:30am-6:00pm or 9:00am-6:30pm. I am morning person and I choose 8 to 5:30. If necessary, you can work from home too (Depending on your manager). This might be the place where you might be working (They have other buildings too).
Every new staff will be given new laptop and staff can choose their own needs (Window, Mac). They also recommends to buy latest and high-end spec because we will be using for at least 2-3 years.
NUS IT is really using Agile project management. Normally, when staff arrive to NUS, the first thing they do is to look at Azure Devops and see daily task. They will need to update how long they need to do new feature, remaining items and add new task.
Does it take a lot of time to update ? Probably yes if there is a lot to do.
After that, there will be our daily stand-up meeting at 9am. I have just joined NUS recently but there is one big project initiated by NUS president. As a result, daily stand-up meeting is quite intensive. It may take up to 1–2 hour sometimes.
In meeting, you will see people from many areas. Generally, there is 1 PM who will manage development team progress, 1–2 business people who will deliver business requirement, 2–3 backend developers, 1–2 IT Architect, 2–3 frontend developers (Including for mobile apps).
After meeting, developers begin writing code till the end of the day. Sometimes, it may even require to do OT. For some people, they cannot have access from home and need to work in NUS. Luckily for me, I don’t need to stay in NUS and work. As long as I have my laptop, I can work anywhere.
Project that we are working on is NUS Student Work Scheme. Students can work in NUS and submit their timesheet via mobile app. Supervisors can manage the jobs from admin portal. It also need to handle student information & payment system.
In NUS, software developer may also need to support for focus group (with Students in this case). After we have created some system, it is tested internally first and later, released to UAT (User Acceptance Test). In this phase, there will be lots of iteration going on and developers may need to deliver changes quickly.
After focus group, it is time to collect feedback and bugs. Sometimes, there can be lots of problems and it may require more than one head to solve those issues. Luckily, in NUS IT, everyone has knowledge in developing software and even our HOD is from IT background.
As you can see, there are more than 15 people working on this project (Counting only from IT team. It doesn’t include from other department yet.)
By now, you will roughly know the daily life of a Software Developer in National University of Singapore. You may wonder why NUS doesn’t have page like Facebook Engineering Team or Grab Engineering Team. I guess since NUS is the university, their primary motives might not be about this yet.
One final thing you might want to know is about Salary & Benefit. Before I join NUS, I refer salary from Glassdoor. But, according to my experience, you don’t need to worry for that. As long as you have enough experience (how much knowledge you have on software development), you will get what you deserve. You can check out market rate about your experience from here. NUS IT is rapidly expanding their software development team as well.
Please leave a comment below, and let me know what you think. Clap 👏👏 if you enjoy reading this.
