Don’t Be A Programmer, Be A Software Engineer
Coding is an essential part of building a software, however, it takes beyond that to actually make the software work. There’s a clear distinction between a software engineer and a programmer and it lies in the work ethic.
Bergas Bimo Branarto, or Bimo, is a GO-JEK’s software engineer. He notes that a good engineer needs to be curious and aware of foreseeable issues. A software engineer should also be able to seek the simplest solution by taking into account any potential issues and tradeoffs. Bimo believes that there are always things that can be optimized in the app to make our users’ lives easier.
Bimo had spent two years at GO-JEK’s Bangalore office and has returned with new perspectives. For starters, GO-TROOPS at Bangalore office always ask the question ‘why’ when they are assigned to a project. A simple question but it connects to their priorities. Agility is also one thing that Bimo feels when he was working at Bangalore.
Dubbed as the Silicon Valley of India, Bangalore has become a hotspot for tech companies since early 90s. When it comes to handling technical parts, Bangalore engineers have longer experiences which Indonesian engineers can learn from.
During his time there, Bimo learned a lot about managing a big scale project from Indian engineers. He believes that GO-JEK itself is a collaborative creation between Indonesia, Bangalore and Singapore teams.
Based on his observations, a lot of engineers in Indonesia are limiting themselves to just being programmers. The difference is quite significant. A programmer only codes, while a software engineer is heavily involved from end-to-end process of product development.
Bimo knows the difference between the two when he was told by his former supervisor in other company that he needs to be a software engineer, not just a programmer. However, at that time, Bimo didn’t see the difference between the two job descriptions as his job was only writing codes.
When he works at GO-JEK (as a freelancer at first!), he still thought that he was going to be a programmer whose role was only to write codes. However, as the app grew bigger, the situation required him to learn to do everything by himself, not just to write codes but to analyze features (and priorities), develop, test, deploy, monitor and maintain system operations, handle production issues and more
The Limitation of the number of people compared to the scale of the business played a big role in making him realize that he needs to develop his ability and learn the complete process of making a software. He even boldly acknowledged that the growth of GO-JEK was largely caused by the culture within GO-JEK that encourages engineers to always keep learning and do things from the start until the end.
According to Bimo, GO-JEK needs more than just a programmer, we are all expected to be software engineers. To break it down, a software engineer’s job consists of analyzing data, coding, testing, deploying, releasing and updating the software so it is user friendly. Good software engineers also need to be able to discuss job priorities with other divisions so both can collaborate and meet the target.
Having interesting challenges coming his way is one of the reasons why he loves working at GO-JEK. Continuing his fourth year journey at the company, he is now responsible for GO-FOOD.
One of the features that Bimo has been involved in the process of creation is called shuffle cards. It’s a feature where the application is able to ‘read’ users’ minds by developing discovery experience stream, “They don’t need to scroll, but in their homepages there are a lot of recommendations [of menu or restaurants] that they will most likely to choose from,” he notes.
Bimo is currently working on international stream to scale up the impacts GO-FOOD can create for customers, drivers and merchants globally.
