Hi, I’m Jeeva. I’m a software craftsperson at Codurance. I joined the company at the beginning of August 2022 and I wanted to share my onboarding experience and first impressions of working at Codurance.
My hope is to give you more understanding of the importance of our people and values, especially our culture of learning, adding value and sharing knowledge.
My onboarding experience as a new craftspeople at Codurance
In the last couple of weeks, I've had meetings with various heads of departments at Codurance. The conversations were mainly centred around introductions and giving insights into roles and responsibilities.
One particular meeting, which caught my attention was the All-Hands. This meeting happens once every month and is open to everyone at Codurance. The focus is mainly on company-wide announcements and answering the questions raised by employees.
In my first All-Hands, senior leadership reflected on several key highlights we’ve had this year. One highlight, that made us all proud, was getting name checked at the AWS Summit in London.
This, in turn, made me want to reflect on my experience and observances so far within the company. After various conversations with my peers, I feel like there are several aspects of the culture within Codurance that makes it unique and a great example for other businesses.
Safe and supportive community
At Codurance, the company's most important asset is our people. We are the centre of everything the company does and wants to accomplish.
The people here are smart and skilled professionals. Beyond that, everyone is humble, passionate and curious about all aspects of software development. Most importantly, we share similar values and approaches aligned to software craftsmanship.
It feels like a community here, where everyone is supporting each other and ready to lend helping hands in every aspect of day-to-day work. The following is an example of what people are doing around me.
- People with specific expertise attend client engagement sessions to help the team identify the best solution for their business domain.
- A group of people studying a book together to learn a new programming language, paradigm, or approach.
- Individuals from various departments work together to organise meetups and share best practices of software development with the community.
Of course, I haven’t had a chance to meet everyone yet. Nevertheless, you get a sense of how people are at Codurance.
Vibrant culture of learning and adding value
Codurance has a vibrant learning culture and supports this in a multitude of ways. We share some common traits - curiosity, motivation and the desire to steadily add value. Be that on an individual, company or client and partner level.
We are empowered to be curious and build value for ourselves. People use every opportunity to learn a new language, get a new certification, improve their skills in a certain area, pair on a kata or support internal projects.
We are encouraged to invest in our skills and seek out ways of improving. This motivation might start at the individual level, but quickly can help people gain appreciation and recognition from peers as they are praised for their contributions to the wider company’s success.
While Codurance has a dedicated academy to train the next generation of craftsmen and craftswomen, at times it feels like we are all going through an academy of sorts on our own personal growth journeys.
We have a huge resource of highly skilled professionals with first hand experience of real-world problems to look to for support and advice. We are all training on how to solve issues successfully and, most crucially, how to provide value using Software Craftmanship principles.
Helping others learn and raising the bar for the industry
The value we drive by investing in our people and their skills, is given back tenfold - to the individual, the company, the community and our clients.
On an individual level, craftsmen or craftswomen joining Codurance are encouraged and given the opportunity to express themselves, share their experiences and give back to the wider community.
Everyone is invested in sharing their knowledge in the form of blogs, podcasts, or videos; contributing as event facilitators, and so on and so forth. There is plenty of space for helping others learn from our collective experiences.
This is an opportunity, not only for individuals to raise their profile within the community. It's also an opportunity for us to embody our craftsmanship values and actively show how we are raising the bar for the industry.
You can easily see how this benefits the wider community and our clients also benefit from the ever growing levels of expertise and value we are developing and delivering.
What makes Codurance different is that our clients value their relationships with us, because we demonstrate the value we bring to their businesses.
Our ways of working are often the reason our clients choose to partner with us - so they can create a vibrant culture of learning for their own people and giving them the tools they need to grow professionally.
These are just a few of the many qualities of Codurance I can list in a short span of time within the company. Although one could argue that it is too soon for me to say, well, I can only say that these are the qualities that have stood out as I’ve been settling into the company. I’ll make a note in my calendar to update you on my thoughts and observances in a couple months time.
Since Jeeva started at Codurance he has already taken the time to share his knowledge through our #screenkata series by creating a video 'how to' guide on setting up your repositories to use Python, ready to start any of the Codurance katas.