Day in the Life of our Spanish Team

1. Can you give us some background about yourself and your qualifications, and what led you to the career path you’re on now?

I have a degree in Economics and a master’s degree in International Trade. It wasn’t until I moved to Belfast back in 2012, that I had a first glance at a career in IT. I’ve always been interested in technology but never really thought too much about programming. In 2015 I was selected by the Department of Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland to complete a BTech Professional Software Development program over 6 months, which finally gave me the boost I needed to kick-start a career in the IT Industry in Northern Ireland.

After a few software graduate interviews, I finally met the Neueda team, and the values and vibes of the company definitely aligned with what I was looking for. I joined the Neueda Team in February of 2015 and since then it has been an amazing journey.

2. What does your working week look like at a glance?

I’m a Software Engineer in a Managed Services team where we take care of CRM and billing for an important Energy company in Northern Ireland. The system was a greenfield project initially done by a team in Neueda that I was also a member of.

We take care of the production system and develop new pieces of functionality to meet our clients’ requirements. Our day-to-day operations kick off in the morning with our daily stand-ups, where each member of the team gives a summary of the work done the previous day, priorities for the present day, as well as mentioning if there are any blockers halting progress. After that, I dedicate most of the day to working through my stack and communicating with the client either via email or meetings to help them define new pieces of work or solve their service request.

My normal day-to-day mode might be interrupted by a production critical incident, which means the team all jump into “incident” mode, where we work together to solve the issue rapidly. I am continually exposed to the production environment, and I have to release my changes and improvements to the system on a regular basis. Every week we hold improvements meetings at a team level to cover pending tasks or ideas on how to improve the project and the system, and once a month we have release planning meetings where we prioritize work and plan the delivery of features or fixes for the month to come. There’s a good mixture of time in the day for you to work alone and to also meet with your team and the wider managed services team so I never feel isolated.

3. What advice would you give to someone looking to enter your industry or get a job on your team? Are there any qualities you need to have?

To enter a career in the IT industry, I think you need to have a desire to always be learning new things. Specifically, to work on the Managed Services team, you need to enjoy fixing and improving production systems, as on occasions you’ll have to find the root cause of an issue in a production environment and solve it as quickly as possible as the client system could be at risk, and because of this, your expertise and the work you do becomes essential for your client’s operations.

4. What do you like best, and least, about your role?

What I like best about my work, is that I can see my efforts (either fixes or new pieces of development) running on the production system within a very short time. A new piece of development will typically go to QA after your development time, and then to Customer UAT, and once you have the customer’s approval, you’ll be able to release your changes to production and see how those improvements and new pieces of functionality are actually working on the system.

What I like least about my role is that in certain moments where a critical incident hits the production system, you are usually under a lot of pressure to solve it quickly, however, on the other hand, when I can solve it, I receive a lot of recognition and praise and I feel thankful that I was able to help the customer to get their system back to what it should be.

5. Describe your job in 5 words or less

Thrilling, Challenging, and Good Fun.