Fresh Start at YouView
I joined YouView as a Software Engineer around 3 months ago after a short time as a developer and a technical consultant, and YouView seemed like a good place to continue my career shift into full-stack development. As with any new job, it’s daunting meeting many new people and learning a new codebase, but YouView has made me feel welcome and valued from day 1.
First Day Excitement
My day started meeting Abbie from HR in reception who warmly welcomed me into YouView’s offices. She introduced me to my team and I was pulled straight into backlog refinement. It was like a whirlwind of information — I learned the project my team had been working on, the architecture of the system and what tasks would be prioritised over the coming weeks. There’s no better way to learn than getting into the thick of it.
I’ve had a few restless nights over starting new jobs, but the team made me feel so at ease, and actively encouraged me to ask questions throughout all meetings. Thankfully this project was fairly isolated from the larger codebase so it was a little easier to understand communication between client, services and data stores.
About a week before I started, my interviewer let me know that my buddy was ready and raring to meet me — a willing helper who assisted me in setting up my laptop during the week and rallied up a few people for lunch by London Bridge on my first day. She also introduced me to my manager who ran me through what the departments in YouView are focused on and what the different teams in engineering are working on, as well as giving me a platform to ask all my burning questions, such as “does YouView require a subscription?”.
The Week Continued
The week flew by — there was so much to get involved with and so many names to remember! A team lunch was organised to officially welcome me, and most other lunches were spent playing Exploding Kittens (not sure if it’s team-building or potentially team breaking at this point…).
We had a 2-day Hackathon at the end of the week; there was a real buzz around the office as groups of engineers started discussing potential features to add to set-top boxes. It was a great success — features including personalised recommendations and skip-playback-to-number were developed and added to the deployment pipeline. I’m looking forward to our next one!
My buddy continued helping me set up my development environment, sharing useful internal wiki pages over Slack for future reference. The on-boarding page with external resources proved particularly useful, and I still refer to it even now as I move to work on different sections of the codebase. Although the wiki pages had great introductory information, I learned the most by talking not only with my team but also with colleagues in other teams throughout the company, who were all happy to walk through systems architecture or draw up more complex concepts. There’s a big emphasis on collaboration and knowledge sharing at YouView.
Picking up my set-top box to add to my desk made me feel I was starting to contribute to the team, and later on, deploying a branch to the box and seeing the changes was a pretty exciting feeling. We work primarily with TypeScript using libraries such as RxJS for development, and Jest and Cypress for testing. After using the box for a short while to test code, you can’t help but think of ways to make the user and development experience a little better, something which I haven’t found too difficult after understanding the structure of the repo.
I’d worked a little with TypeScript and libraries such as React and Jest before but hadn’t touched RxJS, which the box uses heavily. Tasks were set for me to train up on languages like TS before learning on-the-job with smaller tasks in the codebase. I felt less pressured to output results this way since I had a baseline understanding of the language or library and in the end, it’s been easier to understand our code.
What surprised me most was the openness in Scrum meetings. Questions were encouraged since there can be so much latent knowledge, and even though I’ve worked in Agile environments before some concepts and even meetings were foreign to me. During these meetings, I saw (and regularly see) the product in action during sprint review with the Product Owner, was encouraged to voice my opinions in sprint retrospective, and understood how work is broken down into manageable tasks.
From Then Until Now
I’ve worked at YouView for 3 months now and I enjoy work a lot. There’s still a great amount to learn but with an emphasis on pair programming I have the confidence to work in our tech stack — half the battle is knowing who the best person to talk to is when encountering a challenge.
Fortnightly catch-ups with my manager encourages me to highlight gaps in my knowledge surrounding YouView’s tech stack, then my manager organises workshops for groups of engineers, for example, specific code repositories and tool introductions. To quote a fellow new starter, “it isn’t a struggle to get your voice heard”.
One thing I love about YouView is every 2 weeks we have “YouDay” — a day spent working on personal projects to improve your skillset, the product or the development process. The ability to search for future showings or on-demand episodes of a show when on the info panel came from YouDay, as well as an AWS clean-up tool which found unused AWS resources that could be deleted to save YouView money.
All Work & No Play?
Of course not! YouView actively encourages all of us in every department to get involved in initiatives outside of daily work. I quickly learned about fun activities planned by the voluntary social committee and community outreach programmes to benefit us as well as others.
We have regular seasonal activities put forward by the social committee, most recently pumpkin carving to celebrate Halloween. This was a great chance to chat with people from across departments who I wouldn’t normally talk with on a daily basis and get to know them better. Back in the summer, we had roughly 20 employees bring in their children for a day packed full of magic and animals, and I honestly think some of my coworkers were more enthralled by the petting zoo than the kids!
As for helping the community, I’m currently one of 9 instructors teaching nearly 40 professional women the basics of building a website using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Github for version control. It’s a free 8-week course organised by Code First: Girls and YouView accommodates the 2hr weekly sessions in meeting rooms.
Similarly, Future Frontiers have just finished a 4-week mentorship scheme with some volunteers from YouView, helping Year 9 students narrow down career choices to aid their GCSE decision later on. Not only do these opportunities help others, it develops our communication skills and confidence.
YouView in a Nutshell
After 3 months I can say with confidence I enjoy working at YouView. I look forward to collaborating with my colleagues, the tech stack is relevant and it’s in an interesting field — who doesn’t like TV!? The opportunities outside of my day-to-day work are what make it special for me; having YouDays to work on what I want and socialising over varied activities.
As for other new starter experiences, we recently had 9 Graduate Software Engineers join us 6 weeks ago who will rotate around different departments of engineering for the next 2 years. Keep an eye out for future posts to find out about what they’re getting up to!
If this sounds like somewhere you’d like to work, take a look at our careers page for all our current job listings.
