Ibotta Hosts Turing School of Software & Design Shadow Day
This spring, three students from the Turing School of Software & Design visited the Ibotta office in downtown Denver to get a better understanding of what it takes to build world class software. These students are three quarters of the way through the seven month code school program, which uses Ruby on Rails to teach web development fundamentals. Ibotta’s commitment to finding engineering talent from diverse backgrounds prompted the company to participate in the Turing Shadow Day program. The hope is that the program will grow Ibotta’s reputation as an amazing place for engineers to work and benefit students in the program seeking to better understand the software engineering world.
The shadow day was packed from start to finish with the busy goings on of a day in the life of an Ibotta engineer. Human Resources Business Partner, Sara Greene, welcomed the Turing students, Andrew Jeffrey, Cameron Johnson, and Joseph Jobes at 12:30pm. Greene toured the students around the Ibotta office and then escorted them to their host engineers Meagan Cooney, Shannon Paige, and Jesse Spevack, who all volunteered to participate in the day’s activities. Once introduced to their pairs, the Ibotta engineers and Turing students began to work.
The work that the engineers and shadows paired on varied. There was some paired coding on the features that Meagan, Shannon, and Jesse were currently working on. There were also higher level brainstorming meetings.
One common feeling voiced by all three Turing students was amazement and the size of the Ibotta codebase. Andrew Jeffrey explained that “it was very interesting to see unfamiliar techniques and codes from a familiar framework.” Cameron Johnson said that “it is easy to feel intimidated coming to a new space and looking at new code.” He added, that Jesse, “and the Ibotta team made me feel at home. I wish we had more time to work on code.”
The day closed with two 30 minute question and answer sessions. Kayla Trimble, Senior Technical Recruiter at Ibotta, hosted a session geared at answering questions new engineers may have from a human resources and recruiting perspective. The other session was hosted by Ibotta’s Client Group Engineering Director, Rick Wager. Rick provided the Turing students with “some great advice to us as soon to be junior developers, specifically as people with collaborative work experience in previous fields.” explained student, Andrew Jeffery.
The day was a huge success. The Turing students left a thank you note for the Ibotta team and went on to send some amazing treats from Sugar Bake Shop. Ibotta will host another four shadow days between now and the end of the year.
