“Let’s break down Silos in Technology and learn from each other.”

At StepStone we put a lot of empathy on personal development and continuous learning which are imbedded into our core principles. This was one of the triggers behind the idea of Engineering Days, an event created for our Tech people allowing them to share their experiences, best practice and to learn from each other, whilst ensuring all involved had fun when collaborating and connecting.

But how to kick off such a project?

We, the Engineering Culture team, are a team of programme managers with a lot of product management and process background — we are not Techies at all… Therefore, the best starting point was a survey, asking all our Tech people what would be of interest for them and what are the topics they want to talk about. In addition, we reached out to people involved in specific ongoing initiatives to mobilize speakers from these initiatives and help them spread the word and share what is currently happening in Tech. With all the feedback, inputs, comments, and suggestions, we prepared a detailed project plan. We also requested help from our marketing and comms team to ensure that we use the correct company branding when communicating the event internally and to get support in preparing the internal news pages.

During our Engineering Days event from 15th to 17th March we introduced nine internal keynote speakers, and one external keynote guest speaker. We ran ten online interactive sessions as well as two onsite hackathons. Under the theme “Let’s Speak Tech” we have experienced three incredible days full of fun, interactions, commitment, ideas, processes, and technologies however these did not come without their challenges.

The Engineering Days were planned for all our Tech people and our intention was that the sessions will not only highlight their work, but also create a drive and a hunger for more. More in a sense of diving deeper into technical practices, overcoming challenges, bringing innovative ideas to the table, and expanding on our knowhow.

The idea in all Engineering Days sessions was to create a mutual understanding of the topics presented and to provide a safe space where everyone felt free to contribute and to collaborate. The aim was not just for the presenters to shine but also for the audience to get involved, to challenge the speaker and to get their ideas and experiences across. To do that, we had to ensure speakers received clear guidance on their presentation timing ensuring they provided enough time at the end of each session for answering any questions. All sessions were also recorded for those who could not attend or in case anyone wished to return to the topic.

What did we learn?

Before jumping into details of topics shared in the different sessions, let’s have a look at our learnings from organisational perspective that will help us to improve the next Engineering Days in Q2.

We had discovered that for some topics the given time of an hour was not enough. We ran an online chat feature alongside the presentation (we used Microsoft Teams tool) however challenges were faced when large volumes of questions were put forward to speakers that due to time constraints couldn’t be addressed. Our takeaway for future events is to run a Q&A session for the last 20 mins of each presentation, meaning the material for each session cannot exceed 40 minutes. Alternatively, for specific topics, we will provide more time. There is a potential for using different tools when presenting as well. For example, the breakup rooms to separate the audience to gather their views easier, and to get everyone involved. Of course, this method depends on the level of attendees. As on some calls we had over 300 people, the rooms might have been a difficult choice.

The sessions

The event had started with a general introduction, explaining the WHY, and what we wanted to get out of these three days. One of the outcomes was the art of sharing and connecting, to develop a community with an excitement and hunger for exploring, and to break down silos in Technology.

Our CTO Lucas McGregor then explained our common goals and the company’s strategy with the vision for the future. This was very much welcomed by everyone and highlighted the importance of this event.

Our Tech engineers introduced incredible topics, including the “AI Ethics,” where we learned about bias in algorithms and the fairness of ranking and scoring of candidates on online job marketplaces; and the “Technical Debt,” where we dived into the consequences of software development decisions sometimes resulting in prioritizing speed or release over the well-designed code and what are the implications of those quick fixes and patches to a full-scale solution; to name a few. The atmosphere was epic, rejuvenating, and empowering.

We had ensured that there were no more than two sessions back-to-back, and that we included coffee and lunch breaks to aid concentration and avoid mental fatigue.

When talking about different technologies we wanted to demonstrate some of our company’s core values. These included “we are better together,” “we radically include,” and “we are kind.” What was the purpose of it? Tech environment can be sometimes seen as a lonely place, especially when developers work separately on tasks like writing different codes. By launching this event we wanted everyone to feel inclusive, to give everyone space to demonstrate their challenges, bottlenecks and to celebrate together all the achievements, ideas, and developments.

It is not surprising that the topic “Accessibility from Tech Perspective” played a huge part in the Engineering Days. In the session we have learned about the curb-cut effect which described accessibility as not just something around building the tools but rather about changing the mindset, illustrating how, when we design to benefit disadvantaged or vulnerable groups, we end up helping the society as a whole.

By unveiling those topics, we hoped to increase awareness and to contribute to changing the people’s mindset, and not only in their personal behaviour, but also when developing products and when working on innovative technologies. As an example, we can use the software development, where it is particularly important to make sure that the developed result supports the needs and accessibility to everyone, regardless of the level of disability.

Back to the more technical talks, we had the chance to explore the GitHub Copilot and to learn how it can speed up writing the code with Java examples and we have worked through the Polyglot programming with GraalVM where our engineers highlighted a code experiment by using the famous game DOOM. The demo was not only successful, but it also brought people together from outside the technical teams, bringing excitement through the visualisation technique and the fact the presenter had used Doom as an example, a cult classic in the gaming history!

And that was not all. We have welcomed our guest speaker Dragan Stepanović, a senior principal engineer who helps companies to evolve their Engineering Culture, tame their bottlenecks, and maximize the throughput of the value. Dragan has elaborated on the pair programming/XP with co-creation of patterns and how to lower the waiting time. We highly recommend watching Dragan’s session “Async Code Reviews Are Killing Your Company’s Throughput” online on YouTube.

And that was still not all! We had two amazing hackathons, “Interactive visualization of word embeddings,” where four teams with 17 participants joined the hackathon to visualize word embeddings during three interactive days, and “Slimming Down Our Tech Stack — Lets Kill Gulp”. 5 teams worked for nearly three days on shrinking our technological footprint. We held a plenary session in the afternoon of the third day, where each presented what they had achieved. After this, the 80 or so participants in this session voted for their best example of tech shrinkage. Prizes were up for grabs making for an incredibly fun and competitive atmosphere amongst the teams during both hackathons.

The lesson is clear:

The Engineering Days event proved that talking Tech is transforming the way we understand technology and how we use technology for a better future. This event was the first of many where StepStone wants to bring the back-end technology to the front-end. To highlight that we are truly a technology-oriented organisation with Tech and innovation being imbedded in every aspect of the business.

This event proved to be fully supporting our main initiative: Learn from each other, share experiences, and create a strong community of Stepstone engineers.

“When technology is designed for everyone, it lets anyone do what they love.”

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