Working and Learning at indinero
We’re beginning to grow out our team here at indinero, so I thought it’d be cool to share my experiences as one of the engineers here. In short, indinero is a very fun place to work, I’m learning a lot, and it’s far more interesting than doing problem sets in college.
Here’s a typical “day in the life” for me: At the start of my day, I sign into the company support email account, and answer questions for a bunch of users; if it’s a feature I wrote, I’m responsible for any problems users might have in regards to it. I’ll answer those first, then I’ll answer a chunk of other emails while I wait for my brain to finish booting up. This is usually the time I eat lunch, check my personal email, skim the internet to see if anything interesting has happened, etc. If we got press in the past day or so, which seems to be almost every other day, there’ll usually be a huuuuge amount of emails that need addressing. I might sign into our live help feature too. In fact, I’m on it right now, just idling in case anyone has a question.
After that, I’ll probably check the logs and see if anything a user has done has thrown up some errors. If it’s stuff I can handle, I’ll probably spend some time fixing it, because the fact that it’s a problem means it’s more important than any new feature I’m working on. If it’s something I can’t do that someone else can do, I’ll IM them or find them in person, and let them know about it.
Then it’s feature time… yay! I’ll work on whatever part of the feature I’m currently working on, be it planning it out, coding chunks of it, or writing test cases. We all have a lot of autonomy, so when I’m working on a project, I’ll write out the specs more or less myself, leaving notes on our internal wiki and turning that into actual documentation when I’m done. If there’s anything I’m not sure about, say if I want a second opinion on how I’m planning to do something or if I want to know what should happen when X behavior occurs, then I’ll probably grab someone who’s relatively available to ask them what they think.
Job Advancement at indinero
I started as a back-end dev, but right now I’m learning more front-end stuff too — javascript, css, html, etc. The back-end of my feature’s pretty much ready right now, but we’re short on front-end devs at the moment. So instead of writing out my feature, I’m helping my coworker by doing some js/css chunks, which means when the time comes for me to do front-end stuff for my feature, I’ll have more of an idea of what’s going on. At any time during this process, I may be interrupted to help someone else QA their features, or someone might come to me with something that’s broken that I have to fix.
Work Culture at indinero
Other things mysteriously happen too, like snacks mysteriously appearing and getting eaten, our metrics logs getting checked and mentioned if we hit a milestone, product meetings, etc. At the end of the day, we push all our changes to the site and run through it briefly to make sure everything works okay and that there’s no bugs. After we’re done with work, we’ll probably hang out together for a few hours, playing video games or board games, then head off to sleep.
Everything I just described is a “typical” day — but in reality, no day is typical, and our company is quickly evolving. Some days, I’ll take the time to interview and evaluate potential indinero team members. Other days, I’ll feel inclined to write something on the indinero blog. We often hang out with each other on weekends, and company retreats are becoming more and more frequent. The great thing about working at indinero is that I can work on whatever I think will have the greatest impact on the company.
