Today we're taking a moment to celebrate and shine a light an incredible member of our team. Learn about Julian and his work here at Meaningful Gigs below.
How long have you been at Meaningful Gigs and what is your role?
I have been at Meaningful Gigs since March of 2021, and my role is frontend software engineer. My main focus is on individual contribution and product architecture.
Where are you currently located?
My family and I are currently located in Castle Rock, CO.
What parts of our mission do you connect with?
I really resonate with our goal to see the underdog win, which is mostly why I joined the team. Furthermore, creating 100,000 skilled jobs allows us to create an entirely new middle class in a job market that is hyper competitive and frankly difficult to move around in.
What has your experience been with our company culture?
Our company culture focuses mostly around growth and customer obsession. I have only been encouraged and challenged to be a team player and a leader in my own regard--someone others around me see and look up to. We constantly have the customer top-of-mind, and we implement features based on customer feedback.
What is your team like?
The engineering team is like a well-oiled machine. Together, we provide a set of well-balanced skills to accomplish a wide variety of tasks. We are a small team, but work faster than almost any other company I've been at or have observed in talking to other engineering teams.
How have you grown professionally while at Meaningful Gigs?
I originally joined the team because I was fascinated about getting to join a pre-seed start-up. It was an opportunity for me to be part of something bigger than me and get to add value. We haven't accomplished our goal of 100,000 skilled jobs yet, so I'm sticking around to see that through.
All around, I learned to better communicate with empathy, and what it truly means to add value to our customers. For engineers, this typically is a great challenge. Engineers just want to be left alone, out of meetings, so they can put their heads down and be "code monkeys". I particularly don't find that appealing. I enjoy getting into those conversations where reading the room is imperative, dissecting pain points and then translating that into a meaningful product that adds value to our customers by actually solving their pain point. Instead of giving them Flintstones Gummy Vitamins, we give them medicine.
Which benefits are your favorite and why?
OKRs are a huge benefit! It's an opportunity for the whole team to get together, plan the next quarter, and have some good competitive fun, usually on a beach somewhere.
What do you like to do outside of work?
Outside of work, I spend my time with my beloved wife and children, playing music, and mentoring software engineers with various titles: from zero, all the way to senior/staff-level
What’s some advice you would give to someone starting their career as a software engineer?
You will be faced with a ton of noise around what you should or shouldn't learn. You may also be tempted to build yet another tutorial-driven app. Find a mentor like myself who will willingly sit down and tell you exactly what you should learn based on current industry needs and best-practices. For example, if you're wanting to become a frontend wizard and you need to learn CSS, focus on the following: 1) responsive layouts, 2) semantic elements, 3) the Box Model.