Happy Birthday News UK Bulgaria
News UK Bulgaria is celebrating its first birthday today. Here’s a look back at the highlights.
WOW! What a year!
News UK Bulgaria is celebrating its first birthday today. It’s a good time to look back on a fantastic first year full of hard work, funny moments and great friendships.
Over the last year, many people have asked me lots of questions about my job, who are News UK, what products do we develop, what technologies are we using?
Our first anniversary is a great time to answer these questions and to share with you the interesting and exciting things we are doing. We are thrilled to be part of these things and share our knowledge in the Bulgarian IT community.
I hope you’ll understand why I am so passionate about the company, my colleagues and my job.
A new beginning
On 21 January 2019, News UK opened a new office in Sofia, Bulgaria in collaboration with Questers.
It was also my first day working in News UK. I was the first hire and was followed a week later by my colleague — and now friend — Ivaylo Hristov.
We started as two guys who didn’t know each other. We were both dedicated and motivated to make a success of this new office. We were hired, supported and guided by the one and only Jeremy Burns (Head of Software Engineering at News UK). With his experience and advices, we began to build the right culture, getting involved with the second wave of hires.
Who is News UK?
With products like The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, Virgin Radio, talkSPORT, talkRADIO, Storyful and many others, News UK is one of the biggest media companies in Europe. The company is part of NewsCorp, whose Executive Chairman is Rupert Murdoch. You should know his name as he also owned one of the biggest media companies in Bulgaria.
News UK headquarters, London
News UK has its headquarters in an imposing building in central London between The Shard and London bridge. When you see the scale of the building, you appreciate how big the company is and how important the products are for millions of readers and listeners every day. It also forms part of the nation’s heritage and has a place on the international stage. The Times is a paper of record, forming part of the country’s rich history.
When we talk to people who want to join us, they often feel that — because of the scale of the company — he or she will be one of many, and therefore unnoticed.
But this is not true for us. We value each person.
You can feel the vibe in all the teams. Everyone will listen to your opinions, and you could see your ideas reaching production.
My first day at The News Building
I remember my first day in the London headquarters when Jeremy walked us around all the floors and showed us letters and pictures that were more than 100 years old. It’s awe-inspiring to see how newspapers can bring the whole nation together in hard times. You need to see and feel it.
Culture is king
The most important thing for us is the office culture. We are so proud that we already set what feels like the perfect culture in our office. People come and work with a smile on their face.
For me, leading some of the teams here at News UK Bulgaria, seeing my colleagues happy and proud of what they do, is mission accomplished.
2019
We closed a pretty successful 2019. Today we are 25 colleagues — javascript, android and iOS developers, and one of the most experienced agile coaches, Milena Bachovska.
We are working on many of the company’s brands and have several internal teams as well. We are part of the data team and are helping build our brand-new design system. We are thrilled that we have made a significant impact on so many products in our first year.
Our crowning moment
For the successful closing of the year, DevStyler honoured us as the “Dev Team of the Year 2019” at the GTSTechnologyAwards. The award is a significant achievement for such a new team and company in Bulgaria, and we are so proud.
Growing the team from one person to 25 highly motivated and experienced IT people is not easy at all. And this could not have been done without Questers’ help.
Questers is an IT Services Company experienced in helping companies based in UK and US to build IT teams in Sofia, Bulgaria. They are helping us with administrative work, HR, recruitment and marketing. It’s a great pleasure to have such professionals working with us towards a common goal — building a high-performance team.
Full steam ahead
We won’t stop. We are growing more and more with new positions opening all the time.
How do we find our talent?
Our interview process
If you want to join us, you will be interested in our interview process. We have a unique approach in selecting the right people for us. We want to break the status quo.
The interview should not be an exam, the interview should not be a memory test, and we are trying to close the interview process as quickly as possible. Ideally, we get from “hello” to offer in two weeks.
We appreciate our candidate’s time and we know that everyone is busy nowadays. We don’t want to ask him or her to come to the office more than once if we can.
Our interviews for javascript developers is reasonably similar to the most of our positions. We have a two-stage interview process.
The first one is done over the phone or via video in 99% of the cases. It’s a simple conversation meant to help us get to know our candidate better. The goal of the first interview is to see and feel if we can work together, to introduce our projects and give the candidate the chance to introduce himself/herself and his/her experience.
The second interview is our game changer. We want to sit on one table with the candidate and just code. We want to simulate a typical workday, how the candidate is working, how he/she approaches a difficulty. We want to see if there’s a match. This approach is working very well for us, and we found more than 25 experienced and very motivated engineers.
We don’t want to ask you about React, Angular or Vue.js, for example. We believe that we can teach you every technology, but we cannot teach you work ethic. Jeremy inspired this approach and we see the benefits.
We want happy developers
Our goal as a tech company is to not only make our users and clients happy but our developers as well. A lot of developers nowadays want to work with the newest production-ready technologies, to explore new approaches, techniques and to know that their voice will be heard. This is very important for us and we are making this happening.
As my colleague Ivaylo Hristov loves to say: “We are the Javascript heaven!”
We are using some very exciting frameworks and libraries like React, React-Native, Node, GraphQL and Typescript. Our developers need to have the opportunity to touch and work with other technologies as well, like AWS, CircleCI, Terraform and many others.
We have a very experienced group of people who are discussing new approaches and setting the code standards of the company. Everyone can propose new strategies, write down their pros and cons and discuss them with the team. It’s a great pleasure to work with such experienced guys, some of the best in the field.
Spreading the word
We try to be at every Javascript Meetup and conference in Sofia. In the last year, we had meet-ups in front of the React and Serverless community groups. We also presented at jsTalks and many other meet-ups.
We believe it is our responsibility to share knowledge as much as possible. It’s vital for us and I think it should be a priority for everyone.
Could we be right for you?
You can find out more about us on our page on Questers’ website (https://www.questers.com/newsuk), where you can also check our open positions.
If you want to know more or you want to ask me anything, you can always message me in LinkedIn. I will be happy to help.
Valentin Georgiev, Lead Software Engineer, News UK, Bulgaria
