At Gearset, transparency is part of who we are. Rather than us just telling you what engineering at Gearset is like, we’ve got two of our talented engineers, Catherine Bacon and Matt Guy, on hand to give their perspectives.
Q: What’s it like being an engineer at Gearset?
A: Catherine
“Gearset is a supportive and collaborative place to work as an engineer. You’re surrounded by people who want to do a good job and are eager and willing to talk to you.
Each day is really varied. You might be working on a large feature, fixing a bug, releasing the app, speaking to a user, helping our customer success or sales team with a technical issue, or answering questions. I really like this way of working, as you’re not just a coding monkey stuck in a room! You see what you’re working on being used in real time, making a difference to users and helping their release processes.”
A: Matt
“At Gearset you’re surrounded by intelligent people that care about the quality of the work they produce and the toolset we’re building for our customers. The engineers here empower each other’s learning and encourage pragmatism in the technical decisions and developments we carry out. Ultimately, at the heart of our engineering team is a group of fantastic people that I love to work with every single day.”
Q: What makes engineering at Gearset different from other companies?
A: Catherine
“There’s a brilliant balance between being able to approach your work in the way you think best, and colleagues being eager to work with you or help you out when you need it.
I also love that I’m involved with writing features from their inception, planning the work, and finally releasing them into the wild. It’s very satisfying to work on something that genuinely makes our users' jobs easier.”
A: Matt
“At Gearset we have full ownership of the features we build. We can touch and impact every single layer of the tech stack if we want to, and have regular contact with customers to gain vital context and feedback to help us build the right solutions. This transparency and frequent contact with our customers helps direct our product development and gives us the chance to collaborate with plenty of other teams at Gearset, which is fantastic!”
Q: How do you feel we live up to our engineering values at Gearset?
A: Catherine
“Good vs perfect: It’s really easy to get bogged down in imagining version 10, when getting version 1 in front of users to get feedback makes sure it solves the users problem and is much better. There have been times when I’ve fixed a bug in a quick way to unblock a user, and then gone back and implemented a more thought out, robust solution after.
Take ownership: I’ve spoken to customers to work out what I need to build. Planned my work, written it, and fixed bugs. You can see your contribution really clearly, and where your work fits into the bigger picture.
Reject process for process sake: Gearset has grown from 12 people to 170+ since I joined. As you can imagine, that’s a lot of change. We’ve needed to introduce a few new structures and processes over time, but there’s such a willingness to try something and no fear about changing if it doesn’t work.”
A: Matt
“We’re very proud of our speed of delivery in the engineering team at Gearset. We release the latest version of the product multiple times a day and have the flexibility to easily roll back if there are issues.
As much as this is a credit to the automation practices we have in place at Gearset, this release frequency wouldn’t be possible without thinking about how we structure our code changes and the way that we write our code. We have a principle here of: 'We release good now, rather than perfect later', which drives the concept of delivering in small, but impactful, releasable chunks.”
Q: And, finally, the burning question: tabs or spaces?
A: Catherine
“Spaces!”
A: Matt
“Tabs all day!”
Eager to have your own engineering impact at Gearset? Then take a look at our careers site and the new roles we're now hiring for.
