Exercise more frequently. Spend less and save more. Find a career path where you can feel inspired and empowered.
The beginning of a new year typically encourages people to get on track with their goals and, now that 2020 is in the books, there’s no better time than now to begin getting those goals on track.
If you’re looking to kick off the new year with a new career that enables you to feel inspired, look no further. Built In Austin checked in with leaders from six companies across the city who continuously feel inspired to put their best work forward. From Q2 to Yonder, Aceable and more, these companies are actively looking for new talent to help kick off the start of a brand new year.
What they do: Q2 provides financial experience software solutions that are designed to deliver meaningful experiences and support lasting customer relationships.
As a tenured employee, what has been the biggest reason you’ve stayed at your company so long?
Q2’s corporate social responsibility, my respect for the leadership team and the opportunity to work on a slew of exciting projects involving various code bases have been huge supporting factors of my tenure at Q2.
It’s important that my relationship with my employer feels symbiotic and Q2 “walks the walk” when it comes to putting people first. As the company became increasingly profitable, leadership ensured “dividends” came back to the employees, such as flexible PTO, stock grants and wellness benefits. When COVID-19 hit, we quickly pivoted to a work-from-home model and saw even more benefits, including additional company-wide days off, a monthly wellness stipend and a meditation app subscription that has seriously changed my life.
But the best thing about Q2 is the people.
I look up to my coworkers. They encourage me to embrace the challenge of expanding my technical understanding and they laugh and cry with me when I encounter the same mistake they made years ago (or sometimes just yesterday). They’ve taught me how to listen better, accept failure as part of learning and explain technical concepts to a non-technical audience in a way that allows everyone to be a part of the conversation. They’ve also taught me what it means to be an ally, like the time a male coworker, unprompted and unsolicited, shared his salary with me as a means of ensuring I knew if I was being compensated fairly. They make some of the best pies I’ve ever eaten, wear some gnarly sneakers and are always up for whatever shenanigans it takes to put a smile on someone’s face.
I’m inspired to participate in Q2’s growth as it becomes a larger contributor to open-source technologies.”
Looking to the future, what excites you most about where your company is headed?
I’m excited about Q2’s future. The fintech space is one of those underground worlds that powers everything around us. It’s fun to feel like not only do we have a front-row seat to watch the future of the financial experience unfold, but we also have a chance to be part of the show. Not to mention, I had a huge fangirl moment when my favorite female celebrity endorsed a product powered by a codebase I had touched!
From a big-picture perspective, I think Q2’s support for organizations, like Code2College, that foster the growth of the technical population’s next generation and empower local financial institutions are both deeply important. I’m excited to see the positive impacts those efforts will have.
Currently, I’m working with a new in-house built framework for the next generation of our architecture. It’s been super neat to work with the implementation of that solution in various languages. And I’m inspired to participate in Q2’s growth as it becomes a larger contributor to open-source technologies.
What they do: Bright Health is a software company that integrates financing, care delivery and technology to create a better care experience for its customers.
What was the deciding factor for you when you accepted your job at your current company?
It was a combination of how I felt during the interview process and seeing the potential of what we could achieve as a team. It was the first time I felt energized after each stage of the interview process. I immediately felt a sense of camaraderie with the team members and was impressed by what they were able to achieve in such a short amount of time. It’s rare to find a team that has good energy, so I knew I wanted to be a part of it.
I’m excited that Bright Health continues to improve itself for our members, providers and partners.”
Looking to the future, what excites you most about where your company is headed?
I’m excited that Bright Health continues to improve itself for our members, providers and partners. This can be seen in the collaborative efforts between the technology teams to meet business needs.
Information security isn’t always glamorous, but it’s an essential part of our success as a company. We protect highly sensitive data, from patient to provider info. Not to mention, securing the environments our development teams work in is crucial for their success. I enjoy the team I work with and the problems we’re solving!
What they do: Aceable is a mobile education platform that’s focused on creating affordable, engaged and convenient educational content.
What was the deciding factor for you when you accepted your job at your current company?
During my selection process, it was really important to choose a company that would embrace a unique perspective and value my experience outside of tech. Although Aceable’s interview process was challenging, the team’s welcoming disposition really put me at ease. Additionally, the colleague who referred me to Aceable told me one of the company’s core values was simply “#GetS#itDone,” which was a huge insight into their refreshingly healthy culture. The more I heard about the autonomy my friend felt in her role and the organization’s strong foundation of mutual trust and respect, I knew Aceable was going to be a great fit for me.
I’m looking forward to delivering our students more best-in-class interactivities and in-app guidance."
Looking to the future, what excites you most about where your company is headed?
I am extremely excited about Aceable’s future. In 2020, we made tremendous strides in restructuring our platform so that we are well-poised to expand our offerings beyond driver’s education and real estate to verticals yet to be announced. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to delivering our students more best-in-class interactivities and in-app guidance, as well as more inclusive content that reflects the diverse populations we serve. In 2021, we’ll also be making improvements to our learning management system to help increase our team’s velocity in content development.
What they do: Yonder is an information integrity company aiming to bring authenticity to the internet.
As a tenured employee, what has been the biggest reason you’ve stayed at your company so long?
We have a fantastic team of passionate and curious people, whom I love working and interacting with on a daily basis. We all try to be our authentic selves at work, which helps us be creative and inspire one another as we take on the interesting and challenging problems that we’re trying to solve. As a company, we have an emphasis on autonomy and employees are trusted with the freedom to really take ownership of a problem space. All of these things make for a fun and energizing place to work and are some of the reasons I still love working at Yonder every day.
We emphasize autonomy and employees are trusted with the freedom to really take ownership of a problem space.”
Looking to the future, what excites you most about where the company is headed?
Our mission at Yonder is to create a more authentic internet. We see the internet through the lens of factions — influential online groups that may be using a number of tactics to manipulate discussions and information around topics. We’re helping our customers understand and navigate this complicated online landscape, while also learning how we can serve them better in their everyday decision-making and risk assessment. As a data scientist at Yonder, I get to help incorporate those learnings into our products so that we become the go-to solution for our customers to recognize and respond to online disinformation and misinformation. Looking backward, it feels like we have grown so much as a company and I’m excited for what the future holds for us.
What they do: Adia is an on-demand staffing platform that hires W-2 workers so they can keep their schedules flexible, still get taxes withheld and receive benefits and weekly pay.
What was the deciding factor for you when you accepted your job at your current company?
I have been with Adia for almost one-and-a-half years now — the longest I have worked anywhere. The deciding factor in accepting my job at Adia was transparency. Adia did something I've never heard of any company doing before: They gave me access to their entire codebase and SDLC management platform during the interview process. For me, the traditional “black box” (referring to all the unknowns when accepting a new job) was a “glass box.” I could see the agile process they were using, the user stories in their backlog, the build and release pipelines and every code repository they had, so I knew exactly what I was getting into.
On day one, there was no “Aw, dang, really?” surprise feelings. It was like no other hiring process I’ve experienced before. In just three rounds of interviews, I felt like I knew more about what my job would be like over the next six months than I did with my previous employer after having already worked there for three months! While I understand it’s not always possible for companies to provide access to sensitive areas of their business during the interview process, I think that companies and applicants can both do a better job of working to make that black box as see-through as possible and increase each party’s feeling for a “good fit.”
We have built a healthy and collaborative work environment for software development that sets Adia up for success in the future.”
Looking to the future, what excites you most about where your company is headed or, more specifically, the work you'll do to help your company get there?
Adia is going to play an important role in any modern economy going forward. Temporary staff make up a sizable part of the workforce and are an important need for businesses that host large, ad-hoc events. This will be especially true as the COVID-19 pandemic is stamped out over the next few years. Local businesses open to the public will come roaring back and that will drive demand for more temporary staff. This will bring new clients, new workers, new jobs and new requests that we haven’t seen before, but Adia will adapt rapidly — just as we did in March 2020 when the lockdowns went into effect.
My specific role in our mission over the next year will be writing and reviewing technical requirements, ensuring rapid turnaround capability for high-priority business requests and bug fixes, maintaining a streamlined build and release pipeline, and defining a flexible agile process that supports priority changes on a weekly basis if needed.
It has also been important to get buy-in from the engineering team and foster the right culture by setting expectations in advance. Engineers don’t typically like last-minute surprises or priority changes and context-switching comes at a cost. By utilizing a transparent and fair SDLC process where the business and engineering teams are working together (instead of in silos or, worse, against each other) and the consequences of all priority decisions are clear and quantifiable, we have built a healthy and collaborative work environment for software development that sets Adia up for success in the future.
