Open Letter to the Urban Tribe
By — Sourabh Jajoria (Engineer, Partner Ecosystem)
Hey Future Colleague,
Congratulations on making it to UC! What awaits you is a wonderful journey of professional and personal growth. We are a young, lean, hands-on & tightly-knit team who believe in maintaining a high bar of excellence. As an engineer you’ll build smart systems that hold the potential to impact the future of home services and gig economy. Sounds interesting? Well, that’s just the introduction of what to expect.
As your colleague, I would like to offer you some of my learnings that might help you grow as an engineer at UC. You’ve taken the first step by cracking the interviews and joining the company, the road ahead is something we’ll explore together!
Overwhelming start
Being new to the company, the first few days are bound to be overwhelming, to add to that if this is your first job you’ll be working in a professional setting for the very first time. Every UC member you meet would appear to know so much more than you! There’s a proper on-boarding process for every new member but somehow if you happen to explore some of the code-bases before you’re done with on-boarding, either of two things will come to your mind:
- How will I build something like this?
- I don’t understand this, should I go back to college?
… Be patient, focus on the learning process your mentor has set for you in the on-boarding. Most importantly trust your skills and technical knowledge. Keep at it and by the end of the first month, you’ll be contributing to the same code bases with ease.
Ask questions
Be curious, that’s the best way to learn. Don’t be scared to ask questions to your team members, session presenters or anyone you interact with. That’s the right way to learn and understand things better. For some standard questions you might find resources on our slack channel #engg but for everything else you’ll have to speak-up and …just ask?
Be humble
… Not a life advice!
As an engineer at UC, you’ll get a chance to interact with product, business, marketing, also our customers & service-partners to understand and solve problems. You should take all of those conversations as a chance to learn and seek different perspectives. Being humble is being aware of one’s limitations.. nobody knows it all :-)
Focus on Quality
Project Zen: Remember this term, it’ll make a lot of sense once you join!
Quality of your work is the best reflection of how good an engineer you are. Your mentors will guide you to chase excellence but at the end of the day, the choice will be yours (more on this once you join).
Take Initiatives
Perhaps the best way to grow is to take initiatives. It could be identifying some bad code and cleaning it up or identifying a new problem and solving it end-to-end (yes, there are a lot of UC engineers solving end-to-end problems!) or even as simple as contributing towards the building of UC tech culture through hack-a-thons, tech talks, tech blogs and so on. It’s all about showing intent to step-up and take responsibility.
I hope you have found this letter useful. After you’ve joined UC and gotten a hang of things, hopefully you’ll find it relatable too. There’s so much more you can learn just by interacting with the people here. Though we haven’t met yet but I believe you have a lot to teach me in tech, problem solving and painting (you’ll know later), and as an individual. Whenever you join, stop by my desk (or zoom room) and say a Hello!
About the author —
An engineer on weekdays, an artist by weekends, Sourabh works in the Partner Ecosystem Team and loves to use technology in creative ways to make our Partners’ lives easier.
Sounds like fun?
If you enjoyed this blog post, please clap 👏(as many times as you like) and follow us (@UC Blogger) . Help us build a community by sharing on your favourite social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc).
You can read up more about us on our publications —
https://medium.com/uc-design
https://medium.com/uc-engineering
https://medium.com/uc-culture
Here are some interesting picks from our uc-engineering publication —
https://medium.com/uc-engineering/using-vectors-boxes-to-scale-quality-411c877e00b0
https://medium.com/uc-engineering/lets-use-ai-what-does-it-mean-6e45c050b945
https://medium.com/uc-engineering/managing-hyperlocal-operations-during-a-pandemic-27d0867e123f
https://www.urbancompany.com/blog/humans-of-urban-company/
If you are interested in finding out about opportunities, visit us at http://careers.urbancompany.com
