How would you explain WellD to your friend in 3 sentences?
10 years ago a bunch of highly motivated guys decided to make their passion for software and technology their everyday job. And we are still on it. In these years we designed, developed, and successfully delivered many mission-critical software applications, mostly web and mobile. They made the life of people dealing with Energy Grids, Energy Efficiency, Banking, Trading, Health, and Supply Chains a lot easier and more efficient. Our main mission is to deliver the best possible software tailored to our Clients’ needs. Our corporate values are Quality, Responsibility, Team play, Trust, Openness. They are not meant for marketing purposes: these values are for us, and whoever wants to join the team.
WellD Sagl - current job openings and Transparent Company Profile
🛠️ Tech stack & Development process at WellD
Technologies that we use
Can I choose the hardware? What is your coding setup (IDE, OS, Build server, Cloud provider)?
Currently, you can choose between a MacBook Pro on steroids (max RAM, max processor...) or a DELL XPS. Most of our teammates picked the Mac. We provide people with the JetBrains Full Pack License that gives everyone accesses to the full JB Suite of IDEs. However, we do not impose a specific IDE (some prefer VS Code for example). We mainly use GitLab to manage all the development process, from boards to source code versioning up to CI/CD pipelines (linting, quality checks, controls, build, deploy, deliver on different envs...). Everything is hosted on a Kubernetes cluster running on Google Cloud Platform. We use Mattermost and partly Slack as our internal chat tools.
Our software development process
How can I grow as a developer at your company (career paths and learning opportunities)?
You would normally start as a member of and Agile team, developing a product for some client. You would have 3 up to 6 colleagues to confront with during your day, and others around you to chat and take a coffee. You will learn through Pair Programming sessions and Code Reviews. You will normally specialize, also depending on your disposition, towards frontend, backend or devops. But you will always need to get out from your comfort zone. This is the best way to grow in WellD. As your confidence and impact raise, you will soon become responsible for others, and may reach a Tech Lead position. We invest a dedicated yearly budget to provide you with all the instruments, tools, classes, material, experiences, events that are needed at each stage of your professional development. Some of these will come from us, others directly from you – we value much proactive behavior.
Do you prefer always writing your own software for everything or use frameworks if they fit?
We use frameworks as long as we can keep a good control and understanding of what is going on in our codebase.
🔍 Check out the active job openings at WellD Sagl
👩💻 Company culture
What are your key values and what are some daily work examples of them?
Our corporate values are Quality, Responsibility, Teamplay, Trust, Openness. You can read more about each of them on the dedicated section of our website.
How diverse are your teams? What is the typical team size and structure?
Our team is quite diverse in terms of country of origin (CH, EU, International), despite most people being from CH or EU. We currently have a 20/80 ratio between girls and boys. A typical team is composed by 3-6 people, with a Team Leader and mixed levels of seniority.
Do you offer any helpful initiatives for parents with young children?
Nothing specific, but we allow work time flexibility for a wide range of reasons, including child care.
What is your remote work policy?
We normally prefer to work all together in one place and we do have a comfortable office for that. We tend to apply an on-demand flexibility policy, meaning that anyone should be given room to work remotely for specific reasons. However, the standard rule is to be in a shared environment as a team.
If you do Agile - how is your agile process & release cycle? How much coding vs meetings/planning?
We usually work in small teams of about 3 to 6 devs. All the teams gather every morning for a daily standup meeting to share what they did, criticalities, and plans for the day. Each team meets every two weeks (or one week, depending on the project's Scrum cycle) to deliver a demo of what has been achieved, a retrospective, and a planning section. We mostly code in pair-programming mode during the whole Sprint.
Do you have some in-house tech workshops or hackathons? Is there an educational budget?
We usually organize a Tech Lunch on Fridays every second week or every month. From time to time we also do internal hackathons (where all tools are supplied and sponsored by the company). We have a dedicated educational budget for conferences, workshops, meetups, books etc. People usually propose what they want to do or attend and the decision is made together with the Tech Leads (not the management).
Can I work on my projects or open source for a part of time?
You can request to do so, but your proposal will be screened and acceptance is not automatic.
📖 The Book Question™
What do I need to do to buy a 50$ educational book on company expense?
You will just need to send an email to the Tech Lead in charge of the dedicated training budget and then… well, it will only depend on the delivery time to have in our library (yes, we have one in our offices). If you want 3 or 4 books, we only recommend asking them all together, so that the Tech Lead doesn’t get crazy.
💼 How does the interview process at WellD look like?
First, you should apply via our career page, which integrates GoHire as our recruitment management platform. If your CV is convincing, we will send you a tech exercise that should not take you much to complete. You have a choice between several programming languages to complete the test. We use CoderByte as our recruitment testing platform so you will get the results of your test immediately. If these are good enough we will ask you to have an interview (we usually prefer to meet people in person, but we can also organize it remotely). This is mainly a technical interview with a second part related to Q&A and administrative questions. If all is good, we will make you an offer, usually in a short time frame.
Got any questions?
🕵️♂️ Extra - insider interview with Simone D'Avico
Simone D'Avico agreed to share a personal opinion about working at WellD.
What are you currently working on at WellD?
In the last few months I have been busy on multiple projects as web architect and mobile developer. We have worked on two complex web applications for one of the leading worldwide elevator manufacturers. The purpose of the applications is to automate/streamline some of the company's internal processes. The first application is a dashboard for tracking their whole defect management process across their different branches. We designed the application as a dashboard providing a UX similar to the most popular issue tracking tools. The second one is an elevator configuration tool which enables engineers to quickly configure elevator setup for a building. This was a really interesting project because the client asked us to be able to modify the available configurations without having to modify the software. We designed a tree-like data structure that would define a configuration, and set up a DSL for creating one. Finally, we implemented a web application with ReactJS that interprets the data structure and dynamically draws the configuration workflow. In addition to this, we have two teams working on customer facing mobile applications for a Swiss bank. Together with our tech lead, I take care of discussing requirements and deadlines with the client, defining user stories and regularly refining the backlog for both teams (we work with a cycle of 2 weeks sprints, adopting a (not too religious) SCRUM methodology). Both the apps are developed with React Native, which the client decided to adopt after we introduced the technology and provided a POQ/case study last year. Finally, I also spend some time in growing the software culture internally and documenting our internal tech stack and processes.
What do you like most about working at WellD Sagl?
WellD is a fast changing environment. I was hired two years ago, fresh of my university degree, and the dev team in Lugano counted only two people. Nowadays, there are fifteen developers split across multiple teams and projects. I especially like this, since it allows me to grow fast as a professional. Also, I feel like being part of this fast growth in first person and having been entrusted with some projects helped me develop a sense of responsibility towards what I do. Another nice thing of this fast growth is that I believe we built a team of like-minded people: everybody is young (in the 25-35 years range), and eager to grow as developer and professional. Even if (as of today) WellD does not develop its own product, we try to treat each project as it was one, and invest our own time (meaning that sometimes we do this even if the client is not interested in paying for it) in UX research, UI design and studying the best technologies for the job. Regarding the internal culture, in the last year we have pushed to create a lot of different initiatives: we have started our internal books library (we have around 40 books now which employees can freely take home); we have a 'tech lunch' every 2 weeks, in which some of us presents a topic which he/she finds interesting, or a side project; once every three months we organise an 'hack day' in which we build some POQ or small tool with new technologies: just a couple weeks ago we built an AWS IoT button that integrates with Firebase to order coffee at our local coffee supplier! We also like to spend time with each other out of the office, and we often go out for a drink, or to the cinema, and some of us even go on holidays together, so I think that we have a really nice office environment.
What are the things that are not perfect and you would like to change?
I think that most of the things I do not like are caused by the fast growth of the company (and of course, of the people involved). Sometimes, there has been some mismanagement on some project which lead to having to work in a rush. Today, we spend a lot of effort in making sure we have a well structured development process to minimise the chances of this happening again. I also find working in consulting very challenging, as I have to think not only about how to best build the software, but also about how much I can polish some feature, which sometimes really depends on the client's budget and deadlines). Nevertheless, we make a huge effort in advocating to clients the correct way to build and maintain software, so most of the times it's not so bad. On my side, I hope that we will eventually be able to kickstart our own product team and not rely on consultancy as much as today.