Joining rideOS Right Out Of College
By Nicholas Cai, Engineer
I’ve been a bay area kid my whole life. I grew up an hour away from SF in Fremont, majored in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and now work in foggy SF. I’ve been working at rideOS for almost 8 months now, starting shortly after finishing graduating from college. A lot of thinking went into my decision to join rideOS and despite a handful of initial self doubts on my part, my experience has been nothing short of satisfying and fulfilling.
What I’m currently working on
I am part of the amazing team working on the rideOS Fleet Planner product. The Fleet Planner API directly incorporates our fleet planning optimization algorithms, which are some of the foundational technologies that power a lot of the products at rideOS.
Our fleet planning optimization algorithms build optimal plans for entire fleets of vehicles by solving a variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem, a generalized version of the more well-known Traveling Salesman Problem, one of many infamous NP-hard problems. This means there is currently no way to solve the problem optimally, unless we exhaustively search through every solution. Instead, we use approximation algorithms that we know will not give us the optimal solution, but can give us a guarantee of how close it does get to optimality.
You can see how this becomes a challenging but very rewarding fight against perfection. As a result, the indefinite necessity to perform better on a problem we know we can never beat becomes one of the greatest and most satisfying puzzles (and at the same time, most frustrating) for us.
First interaction with rideOS
One of the things I was most worried about starting a new job was potentially disappointing people at the company and not being dependable or able to provide meaningful value.
On the day I interviewed for rideOS, I was honestly quite intimidated by the exceptional backgrounds everyone had, even though it was Halloween and half of my interviewers came in wearing animal onesies. I left the interview feeling amused but with some doubts in mind, such as how I felt I wouldn’t be able to make significant contributions to rideOS.
Shortly after receiving my offer, Justin (CEO) and Chris (CTO) individually called to not only congratulate me but also talk through how I was feeling about everything. I was able to voice the personal concerns I had and they were both very patient and acknowledging, telling me that there is a unique perspective and value that I could offer as a new graduate. If I needed any hint that I was about to make the right decision, this was it. The time and care they put into talking to me about everything was enough to show me that I would not regret joining rideOS.
My experience so far
Within my first few weeks at the company, I was able to learn so much not just about the tech I was working on, but also about the emphasis that rideOS has on maintaining a healthy work life balance.
Expectations are set and responsibilities were made clear from the beginning to ensure that personal time remained as unintruded as possible. Work time is work time, but that’s not to say that the company doesn’t invest a lot into its culture. Monthly team lunches, dinners, occasional offsites, and numerous happy hours at the office all become opportunities to get to know everyone on a more personal level at rideOS.
Above all, the big, initial concerns I had for myself in joining rideOS were completely quelled after a few short weeks. After a relatively quick onboarding process, I was able to jump in to building out a key feature in our platform. Despite being relatively inexperienced, I was never made to feel inconsequential or called out for my mistakes. The entire team promotes and emphasizes a very healthy, safe and collaborative work environment, which is a huge blessing for me coming from a college environment that unfortunately had a few too many egotistical people.
It’s been 8 months since I’ve joined, and I have grown to feel like an integral part of the team and have a good understanding of my responsibilities.
Shortcomings
Of course, this wouldn’t be complete or authentic if I didn’t take the time to point out that every job comes with some drawbacks. Keep in mind that rideOS is still very much a startup, and if you know you’re a person who absolutely craves expensive company perks, a startup may not be for you.
It essentially becomes a tradeoff, and one that is hard to convince others of unless they experience it for themselves. For me, owning very interesting projects and being given big responsibilities that span a big chunk of the company’s value proposition make it very worth it.
Joining a startup is like an investment for your own career, except the talented group of people at rideOS and the amazing backgrounds and experiences they have only serve to reduce the risk and bolster the excitement for me.
Standing out
Everything I just mentioned is extremely valid and captures indispensable traits that I want in a place of work. There is no doubt that good company values are the foundation of any successful and growing company. However, rideOS is surely not the only startup with company values like this. That would be quite sad for the world.
So what is it then? Why not just look for another company that could offer similar values?
To put it simply, it is because of the products that rideOS is building and the very exciting industry that we have the privilege of being in. I’m able to be challenged constantly by all the amazing work that the team is doing and for me to be able to contribute to it is priceless. Helping build cutting edge work that goes into powering actual vehicles and transportation networks in the real world makes being at rideOS feel like we are helping push the industry forward.
From a global perspective, so much could benefit from improved transportation, and I feel extremely fortunate to be a part of that improvement through rideOS and fortunate that this amazing company is the first step in my career.
