A year at Motorway in my first Software Engineering role
I have been working at Motorway as a Backend Engineer for close to a year now, starting out as a Trainee and now a Junior — it has been a busy year to say the least, and quite the journey to get here.
I do not have a technical background, having studied languages and business at University. It was only after my studies that I discovered software engineering, and I used the resources available online to learn as much as I could.
After an initial interview with Motorway, I was invited to participate to the Trainee recruitment day which, as the name suggests, is a recruitment day for new Trainee engineers. It consisted of a cultural interview, a technical interview and a group exercise. As daunting as that sounded, I was very quickly put at ease on the day — how could everyone be so nice! Despite being exceedingly nervous, I actually managed to enjoy myself.
After a successful interview I had one month to prepare before starting, and I did so by taking an online course on Node, specifically a deep-dive of how things work under the hood, and also by getting familiar with the Motorway tech stack.
My first day arrived and I didn’t really know what to expect, it didn’t take long for the imposter syndrome to kick in — what if they didn’t take me seriously, especially without a tech degree to back me up? Thankfully I was immediately made to feel like part of the team, and I was met with a lot of guidance and patience from my peers. In the beginning everything felt very new and overwhelming — agile delivery, collaborating with git, and so many repositories. I made sure to take notes of everything, big and small, such as useful commands and shortcuts, or the steps to debug something. What I found most impactful as someone starting out in a new field is that I never felt looked-down upon, despite all of my questions, gaps in knowledge, and mistakes.
During my first few months I felt like a sponge absorbing information left and right, and I feel very lucky to have so many knowledgable people around me to learn from. As a self-taught engineer I also experienced things like code-reviews for the first time, and found receiving feedback really helpful to improve my code.
After progressing to Junior, I was able to work a bit more independently — I could now merge my own pull-requests and do my own releases. As I worked on more tasks in different repositories I gradually began to gain more knowledge around the product and company, as well as technical knowledge. I felt more confident dealing with issues, bugs and errors, and gained a greater awareness of when and how to ask for help. Some things that I found really useful to progress were reading other people’s code, trying to understand how the platform works and how the different services work together, and observing the ways my colleagues approached different situations. With time, a lot of the things that had been so overwhelming in the beginning just felt like my day to day.
During my first year at Motorway I have had the opportunity to work on many different tasks and features, I have received help from countless of my colleagues, and have learned so much. There have definitely been some frustrating and difficult moments — but that is also what makes the work so rewarding.
