Subodh Jain, Software Development Engineer (SDE) — II (Backend) misses working with his work buddies since lockdown began. The tech team at Meesho is as close knit as it gets and Subodh, who considers his colleagues as his friends for life and part of his family, can’t wait to go back to the Meesho office.
Not only does the team work closely, but also learn and listen from each other constantly. This also includes playing cricket together, celebrating the successes of Meesho sale days by breaking into spontaneous dance, solving hard problems and even dreaming together to take Meesho to new heights.
Having worked at startups throughout his career, Subodh knows how valuable it is to be part of a company that is filled with like minded individuals, but also have that company entrust you with huge responsibilities and the freedom to pivot and experiment.
Let’s hear from our employee of the week, about all the highs of working at Meesho:
I joined Meesho on April 15, 2019 as SDE-II. One of the biggest ways in which my responsibility has evolved during the year I have been here is the sense of ownership. It has certainly increased over time. I have also reached that stage in my career at Meesho where all new problems can at least be partially solved with the learnings from previous problems.
The family that works together
We used to have brainstorming sessions all the time, but now because we are all working from home, we need to do it over a call or have a meeting about it. However, our work as such remains as stellar as it used to be. Lockdown or not, our projects are all as bug-free as they come.
One of my favourite things about my team is that we are all from the same age group and share a similar drive and even values. We love to learn in general and actually pay attention to each other to learn from each other. We are also connected with each other through two to three degrees of separation, as we all have common friends with each other.
Since the lockdown began, I have been missing my close knit group of team mates. We truly are a work family that choose to share our personal life with each other as well. We used to play cricket together every Wednesday. In fact it used to be a huge team bonding activity, along with of course, playing a few rounds of Table Tennis with our CTO and Co Founder Sanjeev Barnwal.
We work together, and party together. In fact, I cannot count the number of times I have danced with Raju (Rajendra Choudhry, SDE — IV (Frontend) — Tech) and Pavan (Pavan Patil, SDE — IV (Backend) — Tech) on sale days. I truly miss sharing those moments with my team. This applies to my work itself as well.
Great work culture, great responsibilities
This is possible only because Meesho trusts its employees with big challenges that have an impact on the whole company. For example, one of the first projects I was part of, within a couple of months of joining the company, was creating a centralised logging infrastructure for all of the tech team. This helped us view and query logs from a dashboard, which was a great improvement from multiple microservices getting saved individually in each application.
GRAYLOG, the centralised log management solution that we created, established a common platform for different processes so that we could see all the logs together at one place. These logs help with debugging the system, the fact that I got to work on something that high profile so early on, helped build my confidence as well.
Fulfilling my responsibilities quickly
Take Ownership is the one core Meesho value that is of paramount importance to me. No matter what project I am working on, I would ensure its hygiene from the beginning to the very end and keep it bug-free throughout. If I do spot a bug, I prioritise and get that issue sorted out right away.
I am also a huge proponent of our core value Speed Over Perfection. At the very first go of any project, we cannot predict how and what might derail it but the best course of action is to sustainably develop it, and release it as quickly as possible. Whatever issues there may be, can be fixed along the way.
Freedom to experiment and pivot
My interest in the field of technology is a matter of curiosity because it’s not like I was obsessed with computers as a child or that I had immediate family members who work in this field. My mother is a homemaker and my father is a businessman; he has a garment factory in Indore, where I am from. My older brother, meanwhile, is a Chartered Accountant. So it’s not like I was inspired by my family members to pursue the field of Technology. But, I did for whatever reason, and completed B Tech in Computer Science from National Institute of Technology, Bhopal.
