Working in London

by Samu

My workplace is located in an industrial area, in a street which is the home of some music studios. The office is one big space with nice wooden floors, and a high ceiling — a very cozy place to be in.

I appreciate that people are focused: there is not much chit-chat, no small talk in the working area. However, we rarely talk about work in the kitchen or dining room — a nice separation.

Coworkers are welcoming and eager to help. There are other nationalities (Litvanian, Spanish, Mexican, American) and lots of Brits too. The British accent need some getting used to (if only people from the England are involved besides me in a conversation, sometimes I don’t even know what the topic is). Luckily all the important stuff is written down and the crucial technical conversations are held in a written form. The firm embraces remote workers: there are two developers in Poland, one in Spain, and working from home is a natural right. Discussions can take the form of a videoconference which works suprisingly well and it is good to see the faces of remote coworkers.

During work, music is always on: conforming to the collective musical taste, because you can up-vote and down-vote tracks to influence the playlist.

Lunch is provided by the company — a huge organizational and significant financial help. They order food from the restaurant at the other side of the street, we just have to make sure we choose our lunch from the daily menu. On Fridays, we get a special treat: either Thai, Indian, fish and chips or similar. The fridge and cupboards are also full of snacks and bevarages (muesli, fruits, chips, biscuits, ham, coke, beer). The Friday evening engineering meeting is best with a beer in hand.

About the work itself: I am helping people who are refactoring the backend of the whole platform to have a simple, extensible webapp that uses industry standard solutions — so I don’t have to deal much with legacy code. I feel pretty incompetent sometimes — I am the most junior in the team given that I have only been working as a programmer for about a year and a half. But this means that I am the luckiest, because I can learn so much from others. And to be honest it’s a liberating feeling to be away from home: we came here to work, to improve ourselves in our chosen careers and to dive deep into it. This is my primary goal for the next few years, and I have a newly gained momentum for it.