Stephanus Tedy on What Makes a Truly Great Distinguished Engineer
The journey of becoming Tokopedia Distinguished Engineer.
It’s better to innovate and solve two fundamental problems than solving ten insignificant problems, said Tokopedia Distinguished Engineer Stephanus Tedy, or better known as Tecil. That principle is what brought him to pursue his current role after going through five roles at Tokopedia: Software Engineer, Technical Team Lead, Engineering Manager, Technical Architect, and Principal Architect.
His extensive experience of undergoing five different roles is a proof of his excellent attitude and work performance. The following story will be from the perspective of Tecil, setting our eyes to see behind the scenes about what made him what he is today.
Started from the bottom
Graduating with exceptional grades, Tecil immediately got offered by several companies at once. However, the one that caught his attention was Tokopedia; a company with an exciting working culture, especially for young people like him.
In 2014, Tecil finally joined Tokopedia. Back then, he was in a new team of 30 people, and everything was about trials and errors — with him having no expertise at all. Then, he was given the responsibility (and challenge) to independently explore the Search feature further.
Ultimately, Tecil managed to bring his team to their first achievement, which was to reduce the average time needed to find items in Tokopedia app. This achievement was essential for the company’s core business at that time: the marketplace.
“At that time, we were challenged to improve the Search feature. After spending some time to figure it out, we finally managed to give some improvements. Previously, the time spent when looking for items in Tokopedia reached 7–8 seconds, but our improvement made it possible to reduce the time by seven times. Now, users can search for items on Tokopedia in less than 1 second.”
Understanding the team’s vision and mission
Because of his and his team’s hard work, Tecil earned the Technical Team Lead position to oversee several team members. Ultimately, his leadership skill brought him to a higher position in no time. He was then given the responsibility as an Engineering Manager.
When talking about leadership, Tecil believes that the most important thing when holding the position of leader is to ensure the clarity of the vision and mission of his new team.
“When you become a team member, you have leaders who give tasks every day. However, it is different with being a team leader. As a leader, we must know the vision, mission, and the goals that we want to achieve. That’s what will help the team to have an aligned perspective, that ultimately become our guide to give our best at work.”
2 fundamental things over 10 unnecessary things
In the middle of 2017, Tokopedia introduced a new role in the Engineering team, namely Technical Architect — a horizontal role from Engineering Manager with more responsibility on the technical matters.
It didn’t take Tecil long to decide on trying this role, seeing his constant thirst of gaining more knowledge and making innovations for technology at Tokopedia. With this new role, he and his team is responsible to develop and make improvements on the Home, Search, and Category in Tokopedia.
With this new role and responsibility, one thing came to his realization: it’s always best to focus on what’s truly important. He went on to give an example when he had to improve our seller record.
“Before making any improvement, we have to know and break down which part of the seller record that needs to be improved. That way, we can have a significant impact. It’s better to solve two fundamental problems rather than solving ten insignificant problems.”
Having someone to rely on
After spending some time as a Technical Architect, Tecil, once again, managed to prove his impressive abilities as he was being promoted to a bigger role as a Principal Architect.
As he is now trusted with a much bigger responsibilities and more team members, Tecil believes that having his team coming together with a collaborative spirit is the key to deliver the best work. Yet, he also believes that a collaborative teamwork will only take place if there is a high level of trust among the team members.
Tecil himself had to learn about trust the hard way, back when he was assigned to optimize Home, Flash Sale, and Product Page when Tokopedia held its biggest shopping tradition, Ramadan Ekstra.
At that time, Ramadan Ekstra was welcomed with a great enthusiasm from 71 million visitors at one time — so great that it caused our website to go down several times. As most of the work for Ramadan Ekstra was handled by Tecil himself, he was feeling overwhelmed.
At this point, he realized that the importance of having trust in his team. He realized that trust means relying on team members to do the right thing and also believing in their integrity and strength.
When he was assigned with the same project in the following year, he decided to put his trust in his team members and delegate some of the tasks. This decision has resulted in the successful increase of visitor bandwidth compared to last year, where Tokopedia was visited 2,500 times per second during the peak of Semarak Ramadan Ekstra 2019, providing convenience for more than 90 million users without any problems.
“The workload can be reduced, and I can be more focused as many team members are helping. I just realized the importance of teamwork from here.”
Finally, as of July 2019, his contribution and achievement in Ramadan Ekstra led him to be promoted as a Distinguished Engineer, or the current position that he is in. His new role comes with a bigger responsibility. However, by entrusting the workload to his teams, the past five months have been going on very smoothly.
Tecil’s long and winding journey has taught him some important values that made him who he is today. Other than putting trust and helping his team members to grow and flourish, he also believes that the best way to grow as a professional is to constantly crave for feedback, so that he could give himself room for improvement.
“One of the things that makes me happy the most is to see other people grow. Regardless of the failures, I believe that there will always be something good waiting at the end of the road. Shout out to the Discovery Tribe, thank you for always giving your best!”
