Starting a new job is always an adventure. You made a careful decision for a new job and now the first day is approaching. This day is especially exciting because it will give you the first impression if the decision for this particular position was the right one.
So it was really a little relief to receive a very warm welcome on our first day. Dirk (VP Operations) and Harm (CTO) said hello from the management side and introduced ePages. Leana from HR made sure that all the organisational stuff was taken care of and Keun-Man - our system administrator - provided us with the hardware. So we were basically ready to start.
Every new ePagee is assigned to a buddy - usually an experienced employee who should give the new guy a helping hand during the first weeks. Our buddies introduced us to everybody. It turned out that ePages is a very diverse company. The team is very international and has a good mix of age groups. You find people from Spain, Italy, Belarus, Brasil, people that are on their first job and also more experienced ones - and even parents 😀.
Our first days were packed with different information sessions and trainings. Many departments introduced themselves and gave some insight about their work. This really helped to understand the company. One of the highlights was certainly the Scrum Training given by Anja who is the scrum master for some of the teams in Jena. The session was a nice refresher regarding the principles of scrum and how they are implemented at ePages. Anja also gave us some interesting information about the transformation of ePages from a waterfall-oriented company to an agile one.
Another session we really enjoyed was the introduction of the ePages product held by André. He gave us an overview about the features of the product. This was very helpful but the most interesting part of his session was when André talked about his experience from the ePages academy. The ePages academy is a series of events for our merchants that is about coaching and networking. So André could tell us what our merchants are doing with our product and could show some example shops. This was very valuable information.
Besides the training and introduction sessions there was not much room for being productive. So it was really time to join our teams full-time.
Not surprisingly the first couple of weeks working with the team were packed with new information. The first meetings we attended were filled with topics, technologies and internal terms we haven’t heard of. But the colleagues were very helpful and friendly, answering all our questions patiently. After a month at ePages there are still questions raising, but it feels like a deeper understanding of all the topics has started to grow and keeps increasing every day.
Code-reviews and pair-programming are tools that are frequently used at ePages. It showed that this is extremely helpful especially for new team members - it helped us a lot to understand the product and the way we code at ePages.
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