A Blooming Good Induction
Hello I’m Ella, the latest recruit on the Bloom & Wild tech team. I started as Backend Developer at the beginning of April and thought I’d share a bit about my first few weeks with you.
Pre start date was the interview process. The usual phone chat, tech test and face to face interview. The face to face element was pretty heavy duty with technical interview, extension of tech test (that awkward moment when you use ‘=’ instead of ‘==’ 😱), meeting with the product team and chat with the co-founder and CEO, Aron. It’s reassuring knowing that recruitment is taken this seriously and has the necessary time commitment invested, what’s a business without the right people right?! It had all turned into a bit of a blur by the end, but it must have gone ok as the next day I was offered the role 😊.
There’s a company wide meeting at the end of each month where all 57 employees get together. We share points of note from each department, learn how the business is doing overall, hear what the next month’s priorities are and drink some prosecco (or beer or soda if that’s your thang). I was invited to the April event where the first slide was a big picture of my mug and I was welcomed to the team.
On my first day I was assigned an on-boarding ‘buddy’ in the form of the wonderful Oskar. He’s been on hand throughout to assist in getting me up to speed asap. The rest was as you’d expect, signing up for all the various third party services, cloning down the code and getting everything up and running (whilst keeping notes on anything missing from the README of course). The day was broken up with a tech team lunch outing at Pizza Express, nom nom nom.
We use Pivotal Tracker for project management and there was a card ready and waiting with my first weeks tasks. It included things like submitting a PR, reviewing someone else’s PR and logging into the staging rails console. I was quickly incorporated into the team’s processes and practices. Two week iterations including daily stand ups, planning, refinement, retros, tech debt grooming (we practice a version of scrum), along with weekly 1–2–1 catch ups with my line manager Steve to discuss how things have been going and set some targets for the first three months. These included things like taking ownership of a feature, doing a week on dev support, running a technical kickoff meeting and presenting something at a Tech&Share (a bi-weekly opportunity for the tech team to hone their presenting skills by sharing something cool they’ve come across — GraphQL anyone?).
There’s a refreshingly active approach taken to personal development. Monthly check ins are focussed around themes such as ‘Career Long Term’, ‘Removing Barriers’, ‘Love & Loath’, ‘Focus Areas’ and ‘360 Perspective’, culminating in bi-annual reviews that are at the crux of keeping folk focussed and motivated. There are two clear career pathways (Individual Contributor & People Management) for members of the tech team. Every role on a pathway is clearly defined with expectations set out across technical skill, getting stuff done, impact and communication & leadership. Look out for a blog post on this topic soon.
Introductions to the different departments within the business were set up over the first month. These were a great opportunity to get an insight into the overall operations, ask loads of questions and get to know someone from each department on a 1–2–1 basis.
Asides from all that I’ve obviously been cracking on with writing the codes. Personal preference is accounted for in terms of setup (machine, editor, env), meaning things are familiar and easy. My first feature was pushed live on day two, so that sense of contributing was quickly achieved. The cards I’ve picked up since have been a mix of product and tech debt features, ranging from upgrading to system specs, enabling colour printed labels, restricting viewable data and a large complex refactor.
The work is interesting and varied, the code base is large (186 tables and 13,769 lines of code) and four years old. This means that the problems are somewhat different to those I encountered at my last gig where I was working on greenfield projects building MVPs for startups. But there’s a pragmatic approach to testing and improving code quality. Tools such as Codeship and Codeclimate are used along with a PR review process and requester testing.
The highlight of my time so far would be the hack day (post here). About every quarter the whole company put down tools, splits into small cross department teams and works on a problem around a theme. This one being ‘How can we use AI to elevate the Bloom & Wild experience for our customers, recipients and even ourselves’. The responses were truly astounding — data driven personalised gift cards, automatically adapted shipping methods, Watson AI with the ability to recognise specific products, chatbots, Alexa skills, the list goes on…
But more impressive than all that is Bloom & Wild’s commitment to building a real team. This is encompassed by end of week drinks, lots of slack bants, flower arranging workshops, a penchant for lol presentations, annual away days (I’m yet to encounter one of these but I’m sure they’re a blast) and the genuinely supportive environment they’ve managed to create. From day dot I was overwhelmed by how welcoming and friendly everyone was. People who hadn’t been present during the awkward first day walk around made a point of coming up to say hello and welcome me to the team, they’re a lovely bunch (what’s the emoji for bad joke?!).
The company values of ‘Care’, ‘Pride, ‘Customer First’, ‘Innovation’ and ‘Delight’ permeate through everything done at Bloom & Wild from company priorities, to weekly team recognitions and take prominence on the office wall. Every action should and does fall back to a value, the same goes for my induction — from the rigorous vetting process #pride to receiving a welcome bouquet in the post #delight and being paired up with an on-boarding buddy #care it’s been flower petal smooth throughout (I need that cringe emoji again…)
If it sounds like the kind of place you’d like to work then drop me a line, there’s a hefty recruitment finders fee we can split 😉. But seriously take a look at our open roles, I’d highly recommend it.
