6 months @XING and none some the wiser…

About a month and a half ago I had the first contact with my boss to be after talking to a friend of mine who already worked for XING. Instead of a phone interview we met in a café and chatted in a nice atmosphere. Two interviews later (another one in a café with my boss to be and the more common interview together with human resources and two of my future teammates and a programming exercise) I got an offer and we settled for me to start in June. I was chuffed to pieces about my new job and couldn’t wait for it to begin! Reflecting on the interview I was amazed about having had the chance to meet my future teammates to see if I’d like to work with them and vice versa. In my opinion it’s essential to fit into a team. And to see that my new employer thought it to be important, too, was a good sign of how XING values their teams and teams’ decisions.

My first day was awesome (a word that would later prove to be one used a lot at XING whenever great things happened). I met a lot of awesome(!) people, got a tour of the two buildings and 8 and a bit floors in sum, the different departments and was introduced to my team (the jobs team) of course. My desk had some flowers welcoming me and my MacBook that I “ordered” beforehand plus all the logins and accounts were all ready for me to get started. I was amazed to have one login fit them all – no delays by having them set up one after the other – awesome, indeed.

I was working on the team right from the start. We had our Scrum meetings and I was happy and curious to see how XING and especially my team worked with Scrum. At XING the cross functional product teams – aka dedicated standing teams – decide themselves if they want to work with Kanban or Scrum and how to implement it. During the first couple of weeks I paired with my teammates most of the time to learn about the product and implementations in the best possible way. By doing that I was able to work on my own tasks after just a short period of learning time.

But how did a typical day look like for me? I started at nine-ish, worked respectively paired on tasks of our Scrum task board, had our jobs team standup, our rails team standup together with the Barcelona rails devs via video conference – how cool is that – and worked/paired some more. Once a week I attended the company meeting, a brief (!) and therefore efficient meeting with updates from our CEO and different departments (again with our colleagues from spain and munich connected via video conference). And last but not least there’s our rails team meeting once a week with team relevant information and additionally serving as a good team building activity of the rails and mobile dev teams. All in all we have a couple of meetings (in addition to the Scrum meetings) that are to me very efficient and informative.

2 months ago I changed teams to work on a new team. In this team I got the chance to contribute to the discovery phase. It’s totally different to programming of course, but for a short period of time it’s a great opportunity to get better insights into the product owner’s job, to understand what it takes to dig deep into the market, consider customer’s needs and make one’s own mind up what a good solution might look like. And in addition to that I as a developer get to know the future product right from scratch.

Taking a break from work at lunchtime in summertime was sometimes like having a 1-hour-holiday at the Innenalster. We would grab something to eat from a takeaway and would sit right at the Innenalster, enjoying both the sunny weather and the beautiful sight of the Alster. One of the many advantages of XING being located right downtown Hamburg.

I really like XING’s culture, as it is very open-minded, agile, team oriented, friendly, helpful and respectful, hence creating a trustful atmosphere. We’re all “per Du” (a German way of addressing each other informally) and the “we” are people from many different countries leading to English being the main language being spoken at our official events.

One of the highlights since I started were the prototyping days, 3 days of prototyping on anything we thought was a benefit to XING: a great idea, something really innovative, something we believed in. The teams were mixed teams, anyone who was interested in the same idea found him- or herself teammates from any department. The whole company was allowed to participate and work for three days on prototyping only. Therefore not only did we have the chance to work on things other than the usual, but we could also work with and learn from people we would usually not work with. It was an awesome atmosphere throughout the three days. Everyone attending was highly motivated, energetic to present their great idea, their implemented feature etc. on the big official prototyping event friday afternoon. The event room, too, had a great startup like atmosphere (even with so many people there): green light, green and black beanbag chairs, cubes to sit on and blankets for the floor to also sit on were the main seating there. So everyone was in a cosy position during the great presentations. Even though it were around 40 presentations, each approximately 5 minutes, time flew as it was just amazing to see the different ideas and the ways in which the teams presented them, very entertaining indeed! And shortly before the party began we were told that this wasn’t the end but the beginning of something great: from now on we would have a whole innovation week (!) every 8 weeks. I don’t know another word for it other than awesome!

And the first one took place two weeks ago, it was smaller, as the innovation weeks are for the dedicated standing teams only. It was fun again and a very energetic time. And the best thing: after the innovation week and the presentations our management asked each team how long it would take them to ship their prototypes and picked 5 teams’ ideas to be worked on immediately and to ship it soon (me and my team were lucky enough to be amongst the ones finalizing their ideas). And that’s* what I’m working on now…

… not for the next 6 months, but I’m looking forward as to what the next 6 months will bring…

* I’ll blog about the what later.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2011 at 18:16 and is filed under Everything else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.