Grads and Why I choose GO-JEK?

Mochammad Alamsyah
Sep 9, 2018 · 2 min read

First, let me tell you what grads mean, its an abbreviation for graduates, a person who has finished their school. The story before I choose to intern at GO-JEK start before I even graduate, when I was in college, I already building my startup, a tech vendor at global management consulting in Jakarta. At this point, I don’t want to join slow big corporate as my first career move.

After Graduation

My first career move is to build my startup, to hack all the way up to Indonesia’s $130 billion e-commerce market capital by 2020. With only 5 tech people, in less than a year, we managed to build a high performing e-commerce from scratch. But web performance is not enough, products need a customer to survives, because of the needs, our investors changed direction and I decided to resign.

After Exiting Startup

After a months break, I have few choices after exiting my startup, either join as a tech engineer at a management consulting or join as an intern at GO-JEK. I calculate all the cost and benefits of both options and finally, I choose GO-JEK. See, I don’t join because of the salary, tech engineer at management consulting is 5x than an intern salary. The next question is, Why? and is it worth it?

Joining GO-JEK

One of the reasons why I join GO-JEK is the impact per engineer have, with 6600x growth in 36 months, and 100 million orders per month with only 200+ engineers, its 0.5 million orders per engineer per month.

GO-JEK managed to move very fast while maintaining a very lean startups model.

This is the same vision as my past startup if it turns out successful. How GO-JEK do that? this brings me to the next reason, learning.

Learning at GO-JEK is no joke, day 1 after joining the intern, I go to 1-week intensive boot camp, they taught us to be a critical thinker, TDD, and public speaking, go here for more detail about this boot camp.

In one month, I and my pairs, created a Linux container scheduler, using Go, Prometheus, and Rails. We name it Saga, a goddess associated with the wisdom in Norse mythology. the project is open source you can pull it here.
Midway to the intern periods, I offered a chance to join 2 months long boot camp, in Bangalore, India. And of course I took the offer, I am forever grateful for this opportunity.

Next is the part two, the bootcamp in Bangalore, India.

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