My Experience Joining Plastiq – John

I must start by saying that my onboarding with Plastiq has been the best of my career to date. My impression of the organisation was already quite high from the expedient hiring process through which I came to join Plastiq – it was only 8 calendar days from my first conversation with a Plastiq employee to receiving a job offer.

I learned through a friend that Plastiq was opening a Boston office. He suggested that I should talk to Marie, a mutual friend of ours who is an engineer here. I promptly reached out to Marie to see when we could grab a coffee and talk a little about the company. I was immediately interested in the company, and I was particularly interested after Marie described the engineering organisation.

I won’t go into any great detail about the hiring process as that’s pretty openly discussed in another¬†blog post, but I will say that I found it highly collaborative and positive from beginning to end.

The Boston office had two employees, six desks, six chairs, and little else when I arrived in early January. It wasn’t long before planning and preparations were underway to make the office more functional, and it didn’t take long to get the office equipped with all we needed. During my second week at Plastiq, some team members from the San Francisco office were visiting and we got to attend a¬†hiring event together. It was great see the enthusisam that they have for work when talking about Plastiq.

From a technology perspective, my onboarding began as soon as I arrived and I had a working development environment within the first two days. I had some reservations about the complexities of working within a distributed team, but they were quite quickly put to rest. The quality of the documentation is very high, and I found the practice of pairing with other developers highly beneficial and exceptionally easy to adapt. It was evident from the outset that this was standard practice and the other developers were very comfortable working in this manner. In contrast to my prior work experiences, it was extremely reasonable to set up a quick slack call to work through a problem. It’s safe to say that there is a high premium placed on collaboration here.

There’s a lot of good humour amongst the team, and I was particularly tickled when I became known for trying to “dockerize the world” in my first three weeks. A lot of the application development environment was already available on docker images, but I set about adding the final few pieces that would allow a developer to have the entire application suite running in a docker environment. It was great to be able to contribute something so quickly, and it was a particularly valuable experience personally, as I was able to work closely with the extended engineering team.

I got the opportunity to go out to the San Francisco office in my third week with the company. It seemed slightly unusual in that I felt like I’d already known a number of the team members in the San Francisco office¬†even though we hadn’t met in person. Dan and Eliot, the co-founders, made some time to get to know me and bring me out for a glass of wine after work one day. The most significant consequence of that trip was the beginning of an exciting new engineering initiative that you’ll soon hear about in this blog. Hopefully, you’ll come join us on this adventure, so be sure to check out the great opportunities at¬†Plastiq.