Working (and celebrating!) at Stuart

🎄🇪🇸 Tales from a Spanish Christmas Party

Tables sitting next to big windows — @xaletdemontjuic

On the 20th of December, Stuart colleagues from the Barcelona and Madrid offices celebrated Christmas together with a dinner at one of the restaurants with the most stunning views of Barcelona, Xalet de Montjuïc.

At Stuart, something we love doing is team-building activities, as well as making good use of our spare time.

If you follow us on Medium, you may already know that we recently published an article explaining how we run our own in-house engineering conferences. There, right after one day full of conferences, we ran our second whisky tasting before dinner.

This time, the schedule was the following: Blind beer tasting, Secret Santa, and then straight to the restaurant!

Blind beer tasting

The mechanics for the blind beer tasting were very simple. Sit down. Wait for beers to come. Taste them, rate them, and above all, enjoy the time!

Prepared for the tasting

Participants had in front of them a document in which they could set a score (from 1 to 10) per beer they tasted. Then we would gather all the documents and publish the average rating of every beer, in order to find out which one is the “best affordable lager beer”.

There was a selection of 8 different lager beers and 4 gluten-free lager beers for those colleagues with gluten intolerance. Sadly, we found it very hard to find more gluten-free beers.

The criteria for the brand picks were:

• Delivered online by supermarkets
• Cheap

So we came up with these beers for the beer tasting, although participants did not know the brands until the end:

San Miguel, Cruzcampo, Estrella Damm, Steinburg, Stark, Dia, Aurum, Moritz.

Gluten-free: Ambar, Puerto Dorado, Mahou, Daura.

Pau was our maître

We averaged all the scores, and this is the list of beers ordered by rating.

1. Stark with a 4.765 out of 10
2. TIE! Steinburg and Estrella Damm with a 4.642857143 out of 10
3. Aurum with a 4.357142857 out of 10
4. San Miguel with a 4.25 out of 10
5. Moritz with a 3.714285714 out of 10
6. Cruzcampo with a 3.541666667 out of 10
7. Dia with a 2 out of 10

And for the gluten-free:

1. Puerto Dorado with a 6.343 out of 10
2. Daura with a 5 out of 10
3. Ambar with a 4.5 out of 10
4. Mahou with a 1 out of 10

Fun fact: Spanish’s Consumers and Users Organization (OCU) published an analysis two years ago, giving Stark the best quality-to-price ratio. News here.

Right after the tasting, we shared the names of the brands, and people had to guess based on the rating.

Not everybody was happy about their guesses

Only Victor Vargas, one of our QA engineer was able to correctly name 3 beers out of 8.

Pau congratulating the winner and giving him the reward

So Victor opened the present and showed everybody the most precious item of the reward bag.

Toilet paper extracted from the bag

Right after opening the present, we cleaned all the mess and played our yearly Secret Santa.

Secret Santa

Everybody participating buys a present, up to €15 value. The present should not target anybody specifically (it should be generic enough so that anybody could pick it).

We blindly pick a number from a box, and we arrange ourselves in a circle ordered by that number.

Some presents opened, some other still waiting to be opened

The first person unwraps a present. Then the second one can either take the present unwrapped by the first (if they like it) or open a brand new present. The third does the same — either take the present from the person before or grab a new one.

Once we reach the last person in the circle, the game is played backwards. The last person can now simply exchange their present with anybody else without others’ agreement. Once the first person is reached again, the game’s finished.

Dinner time

As we finished the Secret Santa game, it was time to jump on the bus, heading to the restaurant.

Heading to the restaurant

Getting to know each other is key in Stuart. Avoiding silos is what makes us different. This is why we create a random seating plan, shuffling people from different departments to each table to maximise the opportunity to get to know new people.

Some starters, water, good wine, and the main dish, followed by a big piece of cake for dessert completed our dinner. The dinner was extra funny as a magician performed a few tricks as we ate.

A coffee afterwards, then it was party time! We grabbed cocktails (gin-and-tonics being the favourite here) danced and, at some point in the night, we took the group picture.

Most of us!

Working at Stuart is not only about changing how things are delivered in a city. It’s about high-quality work. It’s about pride in our work. It’s about happiness!

Fancy joining us next time? We’re hiring! 🚀 Check out our open positions.