BNG-ylan

From our values blog post (here):

• We prioritize work/life balance over maximum delivery.
  We avoid systemic or recurring crunch—officially-requested crunch is a tool we use sparingly to solve unexpected problems, but it indicates a planning failure and we seek to prevent it from recurring. In addition, we should regularly reinforce our expectation of escalation and mitigation whenever someone feels implicit pressure to crunch due to a work overload.
• We intentionally discourage the emergence of crunch culture—managers should proactively help their reports with work/life balance and leaders should model healthy patterns of prioritizing their own mental and physical health.
• We always push people to take all their earned vacation.

I've worked with engineers who've been self-taught and those who have college degrees and have had stellar experiences with both. The advantage university gives you is that they start with a broad foundation and teach you how to learn. If you're self taught it requires significantly more initiative to figure out what you need to learn and then to find the resources to do the learning. I don't have a preference either way (although to put on my parental hat, if you've invested in college already, then finishing your degree is a good way to show that you can take on a very large project and run it through to completion 😅).

When I'm hiring for a role I'm not looking for how you got the skills, I'm looking to see how you demonstrate the skills you have and how you communicate and collaborate with people.

I look for points that show the skills that I'm looking for someone to have in that role, or the ability to learn and grow the skills we need. It really depends on the role and the level.

For someone applying to an associate level role I'm more interested in the ability to learn and the potential they have. For someone applying to a senior role I'm more interested in the ability to onboard and contribute quickly. For leads and managers I'm also interested in their potential and/or ability to grow and mentor others.

If you're applying for an engineering role, I want to know that you can solve problems with programming. Talk to me about the work you've done, the problems you've solved, what you've used to solve them.

It doesn't have to be a perfect match - I used to only want to apply to roles where I met all the requirements and that left me no room to learn new skills. So even if you only fit some of them apply anyway - you never know!

One of our recruiters gave me a hot tip reminder! 💙
"Let them know that companies secretly give tips in the job description, the Required Skills and Desired Skills are a great place to start!"

I'm not David but I can speak to some of the coding languages we use. 😅

The most common languages are C++ and C#, with some JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python. We use SQL on some of our teams, and we use things like .Net, and PowerShell in various areas as well. It really depends on the team and what they're doing.

If you're interested in applying we do try to specify the languages you'll likely be working in on our engineering job descriptions, so I'd encourage you to take a look at our career site.