What I have learned at N26
I am not a typical startup employee, by many metrics. I am very obviously American, and although I’ve been in Germany for 2 years, I stand out in most European crowds (if you heard my laugh, you would understand instantly, it’s… loud). I am a bit older than most of my colleagues on the data and tech teams. This is my first job outside of academia, where, for the last 12 years, I have worked as a PhD student, then as an academic.
I spent my life prior to N26 studying evolutionary biology, unlike most of my colleagues who have a background in tech or business — if you ever want to chat about the parasites of snails in New Zealand or the viruses of bumble bees and honey bees on the Hebrides Islands, let me know! How did an expat, older, evolutionary biologist, end up working in a fast scaling European fintech startup? I think the answer reveals one of the many strength of the workforce at N26.
As a company, N26 consistently emphasizes the importance of learning. We manifest this in two ways: personal development, and the space to make mistakes. As a result, although I walked in the door with a wealth of experience in statistics and no business background, I have had the room to learn and grow into my new role as a data scientist at a fast paced fintech.
Improvement Begins Within
All N26 employees are provided a personal development budget to spend on whatever they might desire. The sky is the limit on using this, and my colleagues have come up with some great ideas. One of my fellow data scientists enrolled in an intensive German course to attain the C2 certification. Another attended a conference about bayesian statistics, which is slightly outside of our daily tasks but still something he wanted to understand more about. I took an online coursera course to expand my understanding of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a field of machine learning we use often at N26. We also have the option of paying to bring speakers in house, to teach us better interviewer or presentation skills. Some people buy books, others get subscriptions to the Financial Times or memberships in professional organizations.
The purpose behind this budget allotment is for the individual employee to drive their own personal development, and N26 supports our desire to grow and learn, and, critically, supports us by paying for us to fulfill that drive to improve.
Take Chances, Make Mistakes, Get Messy!
I grew up a scientist (still am!), and as such was heavily influenced by Ms. Frizzle and her magic school bus (a fictional science teacher in a series of children’s books exploring science). Her most famous saying still sticks with me: “Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!” One of the things I love about N26 is the freedom to try some things out, and if they don’t work out, to not be punished for them. To support this initiative, we do Get Stuff Done Days (GSDD) every six weeks. Over the course of two designated days, you are allowed to put aside your normal duties and try something new (except those who are on call, we do have to keep things running normally around here!) This can include trying an online course, playing with a new feature you’ve been thinking of but haven’t had time to try out, or catching up on old projects that fell by the wayside. The idea is that you as an employee know what is best to spend your time on during those two days, and you have the freedom to pursue it — even if the effort doesn’t produce results, or turns out to be a bad idea. You get the chance to try something without a penalty for messing up. And this fosters an environment of growth, and continues to encourage us to try new and innovative ideas.
What I’ve learned?
I know this blog post was supposed to be about what I’ve learned at N26, but I didn’t want to bore you with “Check out this neat-oh Docker thingy” and “Oh boy, scikit learn pipelines!” And to be honest, again, this is my first job in the non-academic world. Everything is so different, and so I’m learning all the time! I’m still surprised by the things I didn’t expect, partially because I came in with very few expectations.
But one of those many (MANY) things that I am thrilled about is an environment that encourages us to learn and grow as individuals, so that as a company we can continue innovating and moving forward.
Interested in joining one of our teams as we grow?
If you’d like to join us on the journey of building the mobile bank the world loves to use have a look at some of the roles we’re looking for here.
