Do Share Experience with Other Companies!

I work in the software development, and last months I had a few days when I could visit other companies to share my experience and get some of theirs. It gave me a lot and this text describes, how it happened, and may motivate you to do the same.

I am working for Quadient which is the worldwide company that delivers CCM solutions (bank statements, insurance claims etc.). A few months ago, I read a post from Roman Pichlik, the head of development at Zonky (P2P lending platform), about building Zonky development in an open and transparent way. For the start, they created the blog of Zonky developers and started to actively participate in the Java community. These are kind of “standard” ways. More interestingly, he also offered to send their developers to other companies to lead a workshop. That is a bit unusual in the Czech Republic, which is why it immediately caught my attention, as I already had some thoughts about sharing experience regarding interviews.

These days, Quadient grows a lot, thus I am attending a lot of interviews with potential new developers. I wanted to know how other lead developers do them and I was happy to have agreed with Roman that I would “shadow” one of his interviews. Most of the time Roman lead the interview, and from time to time I asked some questions, we didn’t prepare any specific scenario. After the interview, we had a brief recap.

Even though I discovered we do the interviews similarly, it was an eye-opener in some ways. I immediately remembered Neal Ford’s speach “This is water” from Geecon Prague 2014 — in short, it reminds you that you may swim in the water but no longer see the water itself (you are too much used to it). The shadowing with someone from the different company simply showed the same things from the different angle. As this post is not about interviewing, I will not go into detail— I would simply say that Zonky’s way felt more personal and informal than we do it in Quadient and I liked the atmosphere of it. I might write a post about it later, when we do some changes in our interview process and I have some useful insights ;-).

In addition, luckily for me, the interview took place early in the morning and I could stay at the Zonky for the rest of the day. All people I met there were open-minded and willing to share their experience (and I was willing to share mine). I had pretty good informal talks about continuous integration, Kotlin programming language, propagation of clean code and few more. I also took part in two agile retrospectives. It is worth pointing out, that inspiration may not only come from the people but also from the working environment (e.g. a beacon for production failures etc.). To sum up, I believe it was inspiring for everyone involved.

We came to the conclusion that it is worth it to continue in our cooperation, and that we would do some more sharing via workshops. Roman and I exchanged lists of possible areas that people in our companies have expertise in. Quick polls were made at our companies on what from those lists may be interesting. As a result, three of my colleagues and I went to Zonky again to share some more ideas on UX, the Product Owner role, and on how to work with ideas. Equally, in two weeks, Roman and two of his colleagues will come to Quadient to share their experience with continous deployment and Spring5+Reactive.

So what is the final message of this story?

I believe that sharing experience is invaluable, so I encourage you to:
Search for people from other companies that are willing to share their experience and do the same for them.

If possible, share it personally. Go visit their workplace for a day, and/or let them visit yours. You may be surprised at how much inspiration or valuable experience you get.