It’s my first week in Gojek’s office. I’m joining the engineering department as product engineer and here’s my experience of the first week.

The First Day⌗

On my first day, I was welcomed at the office and then directed to the training room for on-boarding process. They presented to us a brief history about Gojek, its pillar, and its culture. After that, a talkshow and Q&A session was held to clarify some rumours laying around the public. Before the free lunch, they took us for quick office tour. It was confusing at first because each floor has different layout. But as the week passed by, it is less confusing today than the first day I came into the office. But yes, still confusing tho 😆.

Meeting the Team⌗

At Gojek, I’m joining the Fraud team. I first met my team on my first day. Every new hire will be associated with a buddy in the team. He/she is the one who is responsible to onboard to the team. In my case, my buddy introduced me to the team in the room and in the Slack channel. He also walked me through the onboarding checklist for new joiners to the team. After that, people were going home and I called it a day.

Pre-Bootcamp⌗

What’s better than reading a book? YES! reading two books. In the pre-bootcamp, we, the bootcampers, are required to read two books which are listed as below. 

• The Pragmatic Programmers: your journey to mastery by David Thomas & Andrew Hunt.
• Clean Code by Robert Martin.

We are also required to learn Java and Ruby programming languages because both will be used during the real bootcamp session. During the pre-bootcamp, there are also some activities to prepare us for the real bootcamp. Some activities includes topic-based learning session, sharing session about learning progress, and speaking drill which is aimed to better deliver idea and make argument with rational reasons.

IMHO, those activities are really helpful, especially the speaking drill. I see the speaking drill session as a way to improve my way in conveying an idea. Because basically I’m still often stuttering when talking.

Lessons Learned⌗

During the first week, I learned a lot of things ranging from Gojek’s pillars and engineering culture down to fail fast, fail early! then to question everything.

The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know

This new environment does really bring me back to zero again as I see that there are so many things I don’t know about. But again, it’s fine to not know about a thing, because at least you know what you don’t know then you can always learn about it.

I think that’s all for what I can share about my first week at Gojek and the bootcamp. See you in the next post!