DEV Community: Alex Mir

6 months with eBay/Adevinta

Alex Mir — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 18:03:06 +0000

⚠️ Disclaimer

This article might be relevant for those who have never worked in a big tech company or international environment as I have.

The whole article is my personal opinion and might be not aligned with company policy or vision.

📜 Background

I am Alex and this is a review about being a Junior Frontend Engineer in an international company for the first time. Before the current company, I worked in an agency and a startup on an MVP step. Also, I have changed my career direction to the complete opposite and started from the beginning and my previous specialty was an Architect-Construct Engineer role.

👯 Hiring && Onboarding

The first contact took place at the beginning of November when the outsource HR manager found me and applied me for middle Frontend Engineer. In 4 interviews, we figured out that I do not fit that specific role's expectations.

Despite of that my knowledge level was not enough for middle-level specialists I did not feel any disappointment or straightforward criticism from the interviewers. The mindset of interviewers in the process was more like “you are the specialist, tell us how you do the magic”, not like it was in my native county “we are specialists and have doubts that you are too, good luck with changing our minds”. This was so new for me.

After several months HR manager contacted me again with news of the new Junior Frontend Engineer role. The second interview process was way faster since the company already knew my background and skill set so I had just a product interview and a team interview. After this speeded-up process, I was happy to receive an offer.

Onboarding

The onboarding process contains:

shipping the new hardware (MacBook Pro, monitor, magic keyboard, touchpad, dock station, web camera, android device for testing [since I have an iOS one])
company departments introduction
tools and technologies brief
“greeting the team” meeting
setup of the product and 3rd party tools

I needed a lot of help and extra explanations since the international environment was something new for me and I was quite worried about my English and cultural fit. During the onboarding, I has been attached to an onboarding buddy which I have never seen after I got rid of my questions for him. I found the onboarding schema great, it helps you not to ruin the first impression for the team with the clarifications of essentials.

After the onboarding, I am led mostly by the Team Lead and personal preferences.

💬 Communication culture

Communication

Since I am from western Europe I will compare current working communications with the communication I saw before.

These are my highlights:

I would say “being nice” is a non-written job requirement because everyone I have met so far is supportive and non-critical, which is new for me;
The company is quite diverse and each of us is super careful about the others’ feelings and expressions;
Always soft feedback highlighting strengths and weaknesses, but with a focus on the improvement plan which helps to avoid anxiety after the failures;
You will never be texted out of working hours. We had a situation when our team member took a long vacation so the manager put extra effort to walk through all possible questions to avoid bothering the leaving one when he is out.

Working vertical

Even if the company is made up of thousands of people, our chapter vertical (chapter) contains 137 people.

I would like to highlight a few points that are particularly memorable to me:

The company lives its key behaviobehaviorsI truly believe in:
act for max impact
use your voice
grow through different perspectives
win and lose together
experiment bravely
Your opinion matters more than your role;
We share the experience around the teams with non-mandatory sync meetings;
Even if I do not know personally the specific person from a vertical I do know that this person would be happy to help me (most likely 😅);
product decisions are made by teams consciously and should be discussed as much as necessary for everybody;
Company events. I have visited the dinner in the restaurant, online wine tasting, and pride month event;
Crossfunctional fully packed teams of 2 Frontend Engineers, 2 Backend Engineers, 2 iOS Engineers, 2 Android Engineers, an Engineering Manager, a Product Manager, and a Designer.
Management as a service;
Remote work. Visiting the office is not mandatory. Also, I find a nice non-spoken rule to turn on the camera if there are just a few people on a call, that helps to sync better with others;
Diversity lections, anti-discrimination lections, racism in tech lection
Retrospectives. Personally, I like them, but I do understand why not everyone does the same;

And couple that I do not like:

We do not have many team events. Company-wide yes, but not team-wide (only one per quarter). So working remotely is a bless and a curse;
Retrospectives. I like it, but I can not judge others who do not;
Motivation comes from explanation (that much that it needs);

🧑‍💻 Development culture

Great:

Architectural Decision Records;
A lot of attention for web a11y;
Biweekly Frontend guild sync to share the experience;
Code review must be done by 2 developers except you. Usually, it is the code owner and feature owner;
UX > DX;
Weekly Tech sync to share important updates;
The company is a sponsor and organizer of Frontend connect in Barcelona last few years;
Different documentation for the codebase of the web, iOS, and Android;
Documentation for the product (!);
87% of the code is covered with tests Unit, Integration, and End-to-end (!);
Holding a hand on a pulse of metrics for performance;
Holding a hand on a pulse of metrics for errors;
Open discussions about our current issues and challenges;
Very comfortable with codebase with TS, functional components, and just a few topics where I got an answer “it is what it is”, mostly decisions made by purpose;
Each developer I have a chance to contact is super passioned about their topic;
I was lucky to see how we are creating a completely new team and getting them to work and how my teammates created professional presentations for them with records and a specific team to support the newbies;
Even though I am in a Junior role I am invited to the architectural discussions which I find very useful whatever much I can understand there;
Supportive team leaders even if you screwed up;

Team Leader: “This is your first task”
Productions after my deployment:

Not that great approaches:

No common convention around repos about their descriptions, title;
Use cases of not-that-important but deprecated methods like in React without up-to-date ADR about it;
Unstable CI/CD causes delays in delivering the features;

⚙️ Technologies

The product is relatively young, so most modern patterns and tools are used like functional components, TS, and fitted frameworks.

The product is in the process of TS migration and how we put the effort there is very inspiring even if it needs about a year to migrate. Let me explain.

The product is just a few years old, but it is already huge so the business is ready to spend resources on this very technical improvement. Since not all of the employees are familiar with TS’s first setup for it was way away from strict one which means that developers were allowed to use any everywhere, but the rules for TS are changing from time to time and the use cases for any are decreasing with tickets to get rid of created ones.

Also, migration to newer technology is a background process that does not interrupt delivering of the features as well.

Zero bug policy

I was lucky to join when the whole vertical adopted the Zero bug policy. Shortly it means that the whole backlog was restructured and only critical or blocking bugs were identified, and the rest were recategorized as improvements. Once they reached the mark 0 in the product they announced that each new bug gets the highest priority and should be resolved ASAP. Also, it is important to have a convention about what to evaluate as a bug.

🧑‍💼 Management as a service

In my previous experience manager was the controller and rarely a helper. Mostly manager was the person who is giving you tasks and controlled your work with micro-management and it take some time to explain what we are doing, and how and why this was important. I mean it is not bad, but not every day at least. The bad about it was that they never were engineers before management 😭

Here the situation is different. Most of the tasks are made by engineers themselves because they are improvements or suggestions to rethink decisions; the rest are features or epics from product management or principals. So the whole work is based on the trust of the company in you and that you know what to do and the rest of the company asks you to deliver the features, just like it was during the hiring process.

On my 1:1 with my manager, we work on my career development and I am encouraged to drive this and set career goals for myself, rather than goals set for me. So I would call it soft leading and facilitating my direction.

I have found the closest definition of our process in the article.

🧑‍🎓 Learning opportunity

The company encourages personal learning with a budget for conferences, courses, books, etc.
Also, once per quarter, we have Innovation days. It is 3 days of trying something new. For example, you can spend it trying to create an MVP, pitch it for the whole chapter and even get a budget from a company if it is a worthy idea to dig deeper. But just learning and being a spectator during those days is fine too. Being a participant is not mandatory.

In my retirement, I may name another company as the best company I worked with in my life, but for now, I can say that I have never worked with such passionate professionals in a good working environment with a modern tech stack.

🧑‍💻How to find a job as a Junior Frontend Engineer in Europe in 2022?

Alex Mir — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 16:49:43 +0000

Hi, my name is Alex and I was looking for a Junior Engineer job in Berlin for 8 months.

64 interviews and 87 matches filtering my email with “unfortunately”

This article might be relevant to someone, who decides to change his job, want to get their salary in European currency, or just researches the complexities of looking for a job in Europe.

It's difficult to get a job as a Junior: companies willingly hire middles/seniors, junior positions are highly competitive, headcounts for junior developers are rare, vacancies can be in German, and there are also separate freelancers sites that mimic in-house work... ahhhhh!

Let’s figure it out!

When I started looking for a job, I was very afraid that employers would quickly realize that I am not a real developer and I learned English from computer games. The fear was paralyzing: it was difficult not to sabotage the test assignment, start preparing for the interview and come to the meeting.

It took about two months to recognize the problem. If I was getting discouraged, the attitude "if you can't do something, start to work it out and it will work" was helpful.

To make your search less time-consuming, explore my eBay employment experience. In each section, I will leave examples of CVs, cover letters, and other blanks. Use and rewrite them to suit yourself.

🏋️ Preparations

Curriculum Vitae
I rewrote my CV nine times and twice from white paper. Each iteration took at least a day: coming up with changes, not breaking the layout (in Europe everybody is in love with .docx and .pdf), and distributing the current version among my social networks.

Main principles:

Predictable structure: header, generalized content, experience, keywords, additional.
A minimum of creativity in the layout (imagine yourself a recruiter with 3 hundred responses per week).
A maximum of two pages in length.
Indicate links to projects, employers, social media, and pet projects.
Didn't forget the keywords by which I will be found (conveniently put in a separate "technology" section).
Relevant information first. I removed my irrelevant experience as a civil engineer from my CV but kept it on LinkedIn. I put my higher education diploma after courses in programming.
Minimal unprofessional information about myself - the recruiter will say thank you.
Official style. I had to remove emoji and an entire joke from my CV. 😞

Reasons for refactoring a CV:

Job interview rejections at first steps.
Acquaintances Seniors reviewed my CV (and test challenge). Collected in a table and added the most capacious feedback from unsuccessful interviews.
Too inaccurate and blurry phrases like "optimizing page rendering", "attention to UX/UI", and "working with technical debt". Replaced with specifics or removed.
If I liked the job, I reworked the CV to meet the matched requirements. Focused on the skills that were required. Pointed out the general features of their story and the product they were looking for a developer for.

The latest version of my CV

Cover letter
The significance of the cover letter is still a mystery to me. But in a competition where there is a small horde of candidates competing against me, I prefer to stand out in all the ways that do not irritate the recruiter.

Basic principles:

Made the cover letter more personalized. Addressed a recruiter by name if specified, or addressed the team.
Summarized the CV in a couple of short paragraphs. Preferably not copying the Summary from the body of the CV.
Briefly described the motivation for working with the product I applied for.
Offered to check the details in the CV. Social influencers told so and they know exactly how to sell.

Cover letter

Hard skills

Verify your knowledge and experience with technology with the canonical frontend starter pack (I have 83% coverage).
B1 level of English minimum.

Soft skills
It's more complicated than that. You can google "how to evaluate soft skills" and drown yourself in methods, or you can go to every interview they call for and ask for feedback.

📝 The recruitment process

Stages:

Greeting interview. This is a welcome part with a recruiter who wants to understand what you are looking for and what to offer you (sometimes the recruiter is subcontracted and has open positions in several companies at once).
Technical interview. This could include reviewing homework challenges, solving problems online, or designing a design system. The latter has only happened once, and I failed miserably.
Management interview. At this point, they are interested in how you used to work in a team, how tasks were distributed, what you did in conflict situations, and what your weaknesses are (it's cool to know them). Since almost the whole IT uses Agile, it is better to pass the answers at this stage through the prism of Agile methodology.
Interview with the team. You're invited to chat with the team on free topics: we chatted about TypeScript and about the desktop set-up. A soul-check really.

This is the ideal process, which is followed primarily by large corporations hiring hundreds of people every year. Smaller market players come up with simplified options. For example, the founder of the company or your future team leader can act as a recruiter, but I have not encountered anything beyond these 4 steps.

The closer the offer got, the fewer new questions came up for me in the interview. Below are all the main questions and how often they are asked:

Describe your process in the last team. - often
Describe your ideal employer. - often
How do you deal with stress at work? - often
What technology do you use and why? - often
What do you do if there is conflict in the team? - medium
What are your strengths and weaknesses? - average
If you need to learn new things, how do you do it? - average
How do you measure the success of a new feature? - seldom

My answers.

I made a short brief for myself the day before the interview. It contains:

Company's mission and products
Personal motivation
Salary expectations (based on glassdoor)
Questions about team/stack. It shows my involvement and leaves a pleasant aftertaste.

I filled in the same brief with new information after the interview. It helped me not to forget who I was talking to, as well as what salary I said before the next one (IT salaries in Germany).

Brief template with common motivation and questions (better to replace or add yours).

30 minutes before the interview I:

Repeated drafts and the self-presentation to peek, but not to read.
Prepared 3 browser tabs (for quick changing Alt[Cmd] + Shift + Tab): self-presentation, company brief, google meet room.
Checked background (no mess, no glare, no people), camera, and microphone.
Prepared a notepad and pen. The interlocutor may be annoyed by the sound of the keyboard, especially the mechanical one.

🔍 Job search

Where?
Sources of open positions (by relevance):

Career pages of favorite companies.
Hiring platforms (LinkedIn, Hired, or Glassdoor).
Freelance platforms (Upwork, BeBee, Freelance, Toptal).
"Weak connections" such as friends or colleagues.
Referral links from LinkedIn strangers. I asked strangers who worked in the companies I was interested in and asked for referral links (2/3 of requests were rejected).

How?
Do not waste your time and CV for Middle+ roles if you are not a Middle+.

"It might work!", thought I. "8 months and Junior offer", — reality says.

Sign up for career newsletters from companies you are interested in and check the career pages of favorite companies every week (sometimes they have a subscription feature).
Set up some search filters and sign up for daily updates on hiring platforms.
Update your status on LinkedIn to "Open to new offers" and remind about yourself every couple of weeks that you are on the lookout.

Job is looking for you too.
The recruiter can find your profile himself. Format it in a way that they like.

LinkedIn:

Specify the desired position.
Describe in detail any relevant jobs.
Upload a photo (look at profiles of other European developers to find out your level of propriety).
Add cross-platform references that help recruiters imagine your personality.
Take ~~cheat~~ internal tests to get the skill badges.

Github:

Pin your pet projects (how?).
Ceate a simple README to the whole profile (how?).
Emphasize hard skills (only engineers will read here).

Leetcode:

Solve problems.
Refer to your Leetcode account everywhere - the platform has become an important source of candidates.

Medium:

Include backlinks to your social networks at the end of your articles.
Feel free to write articles, even if you are a Junior (as I am, but here we are). There's a lot to discuss at all career levels.

Instagram:

Set your profile as private, if you have a too defiant lifestyle.
After you've made the perfect CV, set up your social image, and even had a few interviews, it's time to start all over again.

🤯 Work on mistakes

"Insanity is doing the exact... same fucking thing... over and over again expecting... shit to change... That. Is. Crazy." - Vaas Montenegro

Feedback
After about 7 rejections, I started asking companies to give me detailed feedback about the interviews or tests. I asked for detailed descriptions of my weaknesses and strengths.

Most of them politely replied: "Our requirements did not match your skills" - but some companies even scheduled an extra call to tell me point by point where I performed well and where I did not. This was extremely helpful!

Probably the most important and exciting part of the search: finding out what you don't know. The feedback helped me find out my strengths and weaknesses that I hadn't even thought about.

At each interview, I learned something new about technology, and corporate communication culture or noticed my gaps in knowledge/skills.

For example, at the beginning of the interviews, I didn't know how to methodically solve work conflicts, I hadn't heard about three-layer architecture, I didn't understand the principles of micro frontends, etc.

I also had to try Docker, CSS-in-JS, TS, Leetcode, algorithms (I was asked once, though), and solve problems where I made mistakes in the interviews.

🎁 Bonus: recommendations for emailing in Europe

Don't write outside of office hours. Nobody will reply, and they will notice to themselves that you don't separate personal and work spaces.
Keep your letters structured (very important).
Collect your thoughts and questions into one letter. Email is not a messenger (even on LinkedIn, recruiters follow the structure of the email).
Reread all texts and attachments before sending.

Conclusion

If you're worried, scared, confused, and can't figure it all out on your own - ask friends, colleagues, the community, or me for help. Many have been through the same thing and will gladly tell you how to overcome it. Often the mere feeling of not being alone in this struggle helps you find the strength to handle this.

You can do it 🍀

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