“What was your most exciting part of your day?”
My family has a tradition where at dinner we ask “What was the most exciting part of your day?” This simple question allows all of us to chat a bit about where we spend the majority of our day. For my kids — it is tales of challenges at school, the joys of recess and the occasional escapade of trouble (which can be exciting!).
This nightly ritual of reflection often makes me smile to think how incredibly lucky I am. For the last 4.5 years I have been very fortunate to work at Yammer. I joined right after Yammer was acquired by Microsoft. During this time — we have changed a lot but still are focused on the goal of “changing the way people work”. This dedication and focus has kept me here. I truly believe in our product and purpose.
Here are a few of my “most exciting parts of working at Yammer in Redmond.”
We value people
For the entire time at Yammer, I have worked with some fantastic engineers. About a year and a half ago my family decided to move to Redmond. One of the reasons I was ready to move to Redmond was that I already knew many of the Yammer Engineers in Redmond. They were already tackling some challenging and exciting projects to further integrate Yammer into Office 365. One area that really made me excited to work there was how they thought about hiring. During interviews our team pays close attention to not only technical skills but also other important team areas like humility, communication, product sense and potential. Our team values these traits in people!
“People are collaborative, friendly, supportive, smart, and always want to learn more.” — Bryan Gislason, Front End Engineer
Work is fun and meaningful!
We take pride in not only building a great product but also ensuring we grow as engineers! Some examples of this are doing weekly video lunches. We grab lunch and watch either a tech talk or sometimes a video that emphasizes soft skills. These lead to great conversations afterwords and how that talk can apply to us. Code Dojo is another tradition we have where we work on small coding challenges weekly. These help us keep our engineering chops sharpened and allow us to explore other languages as well (Elixir!). More importantly, these are all self organized by us as engineers! This autonomy pervasive and part of how we work every day. We work in small squads, and each squad develops processes that make sense for that group of engineers.
“At the org level, we keep trying new things. Whether its the squad model, or which tools are best for organizing work or how we interview — we keep trying stuff, learn, tweak, rinse, repeat.” Pradeep GanapathyRaj, Product Manager
Here are some recent video highlights!
From Rest to GraphQL
Inside ruby vm — the TMI edition
Simple Made Easy
How to Crash an Airplane
Coding with care
We don’t just get to ship features to our customers but we care to do it with readable, maintainable code. Every project takes on some kind of engineering work to refactor and align our code with core software design principles. We value code reviews, good coding practices and strive to follow good OO design practices, think SOLID . It’s exciting to work with a group of engineers who take pride in their craft. You’ll find Clean Code or Pragmatic Programmer regularly referenced in conversation. I must have read Coda’s take on CAP theorem a dozen times!
Collaboration is key to building great software — with other engineers, product, analytics. Everyone comes together to build something that delights users. At Yammer we believe in this to the extent that our interviews include a session where we pair with the candidate to get a sense of how we work together.
The Puget Sound is Amazing!
I live in a part of the world that is absolutely amazing. Living in the Puget sound area is amazing. Since arriving here my family have watched Humpback whales breach around the San Juan islands, enjoyed wonders of Snoqualmie Falls and seeing Mt Rainier during my daily commute. City life is also close and Seattle offers a ton of great sites , restaurants and culture!
“I like the work/life balance. I love Seattle. I already loved it from visiting, I love it a lot more now that I live here.” Jordi Bunster Services Engineer
Here are some wonderful links for finding amazing things to do in this area:
Come Join Us
We are hiring! If this all sounds like something you want to be a part of then head on over to our jobs listing! Don’t worry about studying complex algorithms that you would rarely ever write from scratch but rather on problem solving, API design and refactoring since that is where we tend to focus on our day to day jobs.
