Thread by @rajivpant

Software Engineering @Hearst
Is it right for you?

by my colleague Jim Mortko @jskills 🧵👇

We are building platform offerings for media creation, curation, distribution and identity management and e-commerce systems.

We are proud of what we’ve done so far. With the changing landscape in media, we will always have a set of important initiatives ahead of us.

What’s exciting is that we get to work in one of the largest (and best) media companies in the world, where Engineering has a seat at the table in decision making.

Our decision-making in the selection of programming languages, frameworks and data-stores is informed by where we see strong emerging trends around utility, developer preference, and an established track record.
Architectural decisions are made based on merit.

Decisions are not top-down. We meet and discuss. Technology can and should change, but we shouldn’t have to rewrite everything when that happens. Accrual of technical debt, doing it the quick-and-dirty way, going outside of typical process are not options here.

We continuously improve our processes around how we build things and communicate. We work hard to solve important problems.
There must be an appropriate amount of time to address areas of technical debt, code refactor, performance measurement and general experimentation.

So we spend at least 20% of our time on pure engineering led initiatives outside of feature development requested by our Product teams.

We publish clear engineering career paths and requirements.
We have a thoughtful team composition with change over time as needed. We want engineers to get exposure to as much of the platform as possible.
We provide access and availability to training and skills development.

We value individuals who make the people around them better.

BICEPS 💪
Belonging: you will feel like you belong to a team that values you
Improvement: we are constantly striving to improve your experience
Choice: you have choices when it comes to how to solve technical problems

Equality: we strive to have a completely level playing field for everyone
Predictability: you will have a stable environment to work in, free of drama
Significance: you will be building important (and cool) things here!

Transparency
We strive to ensure we are clear on the work we need to accomplish as well estimating when we can deliver the work we’ve committed to.

We must spend the time necessary to explain any technical details relevant to a project or the health of the platform to our partners in Product teams.

Engineering sets delivery dates. We will not receive a date and work backwards towards it. If for some reason there is a hard date, we can discuss what is in scope for that date or how we can add more resources to the effort.

A healthy work life balance is critical for everyone in Engineering here! Especially in these times.

Communication
We use public #Slack rooms to ask questions and exchange information. It keeps a record of the discussion others can refer back to and benefit from.

We love @SlackHQ. We have written #slackbots that do useful things for us. For example: trigger code to various environments, application performance monitoring, kicking off load-tests, delivering data about our platform metrics, and much more...

Architecture
We have embraced a domain-driven, micro-services based approach to how we have and continue to build our platform.

In a nutshell: RESTful back-end services, connected to a GraphQL layer that delivers federated responses to our front-end services.

We are cloud based and engineers can spin up any or all services for the platform locally for development efforts. Auto-scaling server nodes and the pods within them gives us maximum performance coupled with cost-effective use of compute power.

Tech Stacks
In order to be in the best position to serve the needs of the business and pivot resources to projects that need more attention, we have standardized our tech stacks.

Back-end: Python (Flask, FastAPI, Django)
Front-end: JavaScript (Node.js, React.js, NEXT.js, Apollo GraphQL)
Datastores: Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch
We will always continue to evaluate these choices as well as emerging languages , frameworks, datastores and architectures.

People Matter Most
We care that you feel excited to get to work every day and feel fulfilled in your position.
We strive to offer you the best environment to work in: be it in one of our fantastic offices or fully remotely.

We have a culture of people who want to help others learn and succeed.
And no problem in our Engineering team is “someone else’s problem”. We are all in it together.

We all are here to write software code. No matter how your role changes or what seniority level you have, we want you to not stop writing code. There’s always some time you can devote to writing or reviewing code, even in management.

Write open source software. Be a good person. Find out more about our values and reach out to us at docs.google.com/presentation/d…