How I found out that Emarsys Budapest values are important for me before I even knew they had existed

In this article I’m going to talk about my way leading to Emarsys.

Back in the day, I was studying Computer Science at the University of Pécs when I became a self employed software developer. The main reason behind this was a work opportunity where a company from Budapest was looking for a contractor for a Vue.js project. At this time I was already working as a student, but this new opportunity was attractive both professionally and financially. I gave up my student work and accepted the job. I worked about 30–40 hours a week, which seems a lot besides university studies but my working hours were flexible so I could find the time for both work and studying. My task was to create web applications supported by predesigned views. All the tasks and requirements came in written form through a project management tool, called Asana. There were about 7 people working for this company, we used Slack as the main communication channel. If I had any questions, I knew whom to ask. My boss called me every Monday and asked how I was progressing with the project. I really liked this new setup, and compared to my previous student job, our work had a structure. I took it as a great step forward, I was really satisfied.

One and a half year passed by like this, Covid arrived, I finished university and started to feel a bit lonely sitting at home every day and having minimal communication with my workmates. I felt like maybe this position is not fitting me so well anymore. As our projects changed, I had to contact many of my colleagues and I discovered that talking to them gave me joy. I really enjoyed thinking together about a problem, but I felt that this way of working is not present enough in my everyday work. Communication was the first of the 4 Emarsys Budapest company values that I realized it really mattered to me.

By the end of the last half year, I learned how important teamwork was for me and how much I liked thinking together with others. I also started to think about my future and as I finished university, I had the urge to find some more consistent and future-proof workplace. My applications were sent to multiple tech companies and most of them called me in for an interview. In my hometown, Pécs, there were two sympathetic companies who offered interesting projects, breakfast and a nice office, but in the end we couldn’t come to an agreement. So I kept on being a freelancer. As time wore on, the number of my clients grew and I was not working for only one company anymore. For the new clients, I engineered whole applications, negotiated with them and carried out their wishes. These new activities taught me that only coding the tasks others created for me is not my thing. These project gave me the feeling that I have real impact. I wanted to carry out whole projects, from scratch, to the end. Despite this discovery I kept on freelancing for the first company because they gave me consistent work and they were upright. During these years my focus shifted on doing front end development. It was not my choice, they needed people for that and I was really good at it. I asked my boss multiple times during the years to give me some backend tasks, but for some reason it rarely happened. At this time, I knew that I didn’t want to be stuck as a Vue.js developer and I wanted to open up for more versatile technologies. I felt passionate about my work, I wanted to get better to create better software for our clients.

One time I could settle with a company in Pécs, but that only lasted for one project because of our different focuses. During the few months of our mutual work I attended the office 3 days a week. Here I experienced what it is like to work in an office surrounded by colleagues. They also reviewed my code and we thoroughly planned our tasks together. I really liked the situation because I experienced what it is like to work in a real team, planning and carrying out tasks together. Our opinion and view was significant. Sadly our relationship only lasted for a couple of months because of the difference of our main stacks.

My next stop was also a tech company, located in Pécs. Here I went to the office full time but I was still not an employee. No matter how much we planned with the team, the chaos was still unbelievable. We, the developers, had to guess what the management wanted us to do, how the app should work and how it should look like. We were hardly allowed to write any new code, we had to re-use snippets from the past projects. This way there was no opportunity to improve code quality and learn new methods. Here I experienced that our judgement didn’t really matter. Even if we knew that there was a better way to write the code, we were not allowed to do so. I lasted there for 3 months, I still don’t know how.

After that terrible experience I called the company whom I have been working for 2 years then and asked them if they could give me tasks that fill the whole workweek. They could, so I went back to them. By this time I knew that this place is a dead end for me, but not having any better opportunities I kept on going.

By this time, based on my previous experiences, I was able to set up a solid set of requirements for my future workplace to fulfil. As I was planning to find a long term workplace, I wanted to make the least trade-offs possible.

To sum up, what was (is) important to me:

• Elaborated tasks — exact description of what needs to be done. This way we can create what the customers actually want and have a real impact.
• Challenging situations — routine work is fine as well but not all the time. I wanted to use my judgement.
• Teamwork. Communication is key.
• High end implementation — a place where passionate software developers work who want to create a quality codebase.
• Hybrid work.
• Satisfying salary.

What is a plus for me:

• Learning possibility — trainings, learning from colleagues, versatile projects.
• Pleasant workspace.

What is a no go for me:

• No chance to improve — I need to know how I can get better in my job and how I can get higher in the company.
• Exclusive technology — I do not want to get stuck in an area, eg. frontend, backend or python development.
• Self employed status.

What points could Emarsys fulfil for me? I feel like I found a place for the long run. When I first wrote this article, I did not think of our company values. Then I realized that I just wrote them down but didn’t name them. After that realization I only had to amend this article with a few sentences to incorporate the four values: Passion, Judgement, Impact and Communication. So I think I found the right place.

During the application process my future colleagues talked about their everyday work life, that they use test-driven development, they have CI/CD and many other elaborated solutions. None of the negative traits seemed to be there and all the things I wished for were found.

All in all I can say that the past months, working as an Emartian did not disappoint me in any way. Everything that was said during the interview process has proven to be true and I already learned a bunch of new things and I also see that there are still many possibilities to learn and improve. Also, being an employee brought consistency to my life. No more calls out of working hours that something needs to be done immediately. If you consider applying to Emarsys, I really advise you to take an interview and get to know how we work here.