Meet Dany, who joined BlaBlaCar as a Data Scientist during the Covid-19 lockdown

Hi Dany. Tell us about yourself.

I’m Dany, and I’m currently a Data Scientist at BlaBlaCar. Our team’s mission is to improve the efficiency of other teams by automating data flows and decision making. This includes, for instance, detecting fraud, assisting marketing decisions, or designing new bus networks for BlaBlaBus.

Before joining BlaBlaCar, I studied engineering in France and the United States. After graduating, I joined Amazon as a Software Engineer. My first job was first to help integrate more Alexa in a smart home system (try it out!) and then I worked on the search engine. Missing croissants too much, I decided to go back to France — and what better timing than a pandemic to change a job and country?

Why BlaBlaCar?

I wanted to work in a tech-first and international environment. Working at Amazon, I realised that I liked working on products that I enjoy using since I can relate to users. BlaBlaCar checked these boxes. If you add the positive environmental impact and the Fun & Serious culture of BlaBlaCar, I was convinced it was a good fit.

My favorite thing so far, besides adding “BlaBla” as a prefix to a lot of nouns, is the room for human interaction and collaboration. There are many opportunities to work with people across departments, and what’s particularly exciting is how closely I get to work with the Product team. In that sense, you get to really understand how your work fits in the overall product and how it can better serve our community of travelers.

How was your remote integration experience?

The good news about joining a team during lockdown was that there would be no “first day at work anxiety” since there was literally no first day at work and no need to worry about which shoes to wear. The not-so-good news is that at that time I thought it would be hard to integrate with the team remotely. But I had multiple onboarding sessions to get me on track:

#1 Team onboarding
It consisted of 3 different parts:

• Project: I discovered and started working on my first project and had many interactions with the person handing me the work. This was the opportunity to understand the stack we are using, such as Google Cloud Platform’s Cloud Run to run the models on, as well as other Data Workflows.
• Team buddy: I had a teammate to whom I can ask any question regarding the team, the company… literally everything that crossed my mind. He gave me all the tips to get started.
• Meetings: I had many meetings during my first weeks to learn about the different topics my teammates worked on and the tools they were using. This was for instance the opportunity to understand how our data warehouse works, which data is available and when, and how it is computed. I was able to hit the ground running with clear info on how to navigate our data and the ability to learn about tools I was using for the first time.

#2 Company Onboarding Week
I learned about the ins and outs of the company: strategy, teams, culture, you name it. Due to the context, this one happened 2 months after I joined and was 100% remote, which means that almost every day for a few weeks, I had many video meetings where I would learn about our different services (BlaBlaSure, BlaBlaLines…) and everything BlaBla-related. One of the very cool parts was to embody my favorite value, Be The Member. With other newbies, we had a day off to pick a city near Paris and try out the product with all of the necessary sanitary precautions.

#3 Engineering Onboarding
This one tackled the technical aspects of different teams and their stack. As Data Scientists, the stack we use is different from other engineers’. It was therefore the opportunity to learn about processes (more here) that other teams have in place and to understand the ownership of the different APIs.

Prior to this onboarding, the different services I heard about were mostly the ones related to data-related projects. It therefore helped me understand the big picture and not only limited to our use case. One of my favorite parts was to learn more about the Foundations teams, which deploy so many tools I didn’t know about to help engineers be more efficient and overall have a reliable service.

What were some challenges you experienced during your integration and how did you overcome them?

Integrating: When you start working remotely, you don’t really get the chance to discuss with people outside of your team or scope of work. Having these onboarding sessions was a nice way to chat with other newbies, teams, and even our CTO @Olivier Bonnet. What helped the most was the morning coffee chats with my team to discuss anything but work for 15 minutes a day. This was the best opportunity to get to know people on the team rather than only their SQL queries. After a few weeks of these meetings, I felt I knew them in real life (but with more pixels).

Team culture: remotely, it’s harder to detect small, but important team habits: how quickly can we expect to have an answer to our messages? How often do we ask questions, on Slack or in person? Thankfully, BlaBlaCar has a really strong culture of transparency, which allows us to ask these questions.

Asking questions: as a newbie, it’s harder to ask the small questions that might not warrant a Slack message or would be faster in person. It makes it more challenging to get access to information. But it allows you to really think twice about your questions: many get answered digging one extra minute into the code, and I could do it at my pace.

Technical discussions: online meetings were helpful to get to know how we compute many metrics and data, but we often missed the meeting’s room whiteboard to go over different modeling approaches.

Hardware: Unfortunately I had to wait a few weeks before getting my work laptop and had to start working on mine. Usually, I first set up my dev environment, which is time-consuming. But since it was only a temporary environment, I had to sort between the things what could wait and what couldn’t, and get creative about what could be on the cloud, with pros and cons, instead of on my local machine. It was, for instance, the opportunity to try the AI Platform Notebooks on GCP to avoid working on my machine and share work more easily. Today, the situation is much better and the team is doing a great job. Newcomers have their hardware on Day 1: a good example of our value “Fail, Learn, Succeed”.

What advice would you give to someone joining a company remotely?

Attend meetings/talks/events: What helped me get started remotely was to use any opportunity for social interaction. “Do you have one minute for a call?”, someone asks on Slack, “sure I do!” was always the answer. At BlaBlaCar we are lucky to have many demos or company-wide talks which is another opportunity to learn about the company.

Ask questions: Everyone in the company is very friendly and willing to help. Many of these questions led to calls, which led to more questions, more learnings, and more social interactions.

Ask them in bulk: To be mindful of everyone’s time, I decided to write down all the questions that I had over time, and ask them all at once to limit the disruption. I found that by waiting for all the non-critical ones, many got answered with time, which reduced their number from 10 to 5. Eventually, in discussing answers to some questions, it answered more questions. At the end of the day, I would only have 3 left.

Give feedback: Between all the meetings and 1:1s, there is always the opportunity to say when something feels wrong, or, equally important, when something is good. Since onboarding remotely is new to a lot of people, it might not be perfect. Therefore, sharing feedback always helps. For instance, I mentioned to my manager that waiting a couple of months for our general onboarding to learn about the culture and the company processes was not ideal. He therefore specifically crafted an onboarding document to help me understand all this ahead of time, which was really helpful.

Overall, I am really glad I joined BlaBlaCar. The culture of the company and everyone in my team made it very easy for me to get started and helped me find solutions to all the challenges I faced onboarding remotely. By the way, did I mention that we’re hiring?

Thanks to Emilie Baliozian who helped me a lot with this article and to everyone who provided feedback.