My Experiences Working for a US Startup from Islamabad Pakistan

Tell us about your educational and technical background?

I graduated in 2020 from National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences Islamabad (NUCES/FAST) with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. During university, I got the opportunity to work on IOS App Development during summer vacations. I also took courses on web development and made a small social media site, which triggered my interest in web development. My final year project was a MEAN Stack web application that generated travel itineraries for people who were traveling to the Northern areas of Pakistan.

Was your first ever job with Turing tech? If so, how did you land this tech company?

After graduating the first job interview I gave was at Turing technologies. The interview went well and I was given the job offer letter within an hour or two. I started working as a trainee web developer on WalletFlo which is on VENM stack.

How has been your experience working 100% remote?

I am working 100% remotely at Turing Tech. The first project that was assigned to me was WalletFlo. The best thing about working on Walletflo was that this project was in its initial days. There were only 1500 users at that time. So by working on it, I got the flavor of both: building new features, as well as, optimizing the previous features to cater the growing user base.

Was this one year journey really that smooth?

The first hiccup in my job came after 6 months when a new feature that we deployed made our application so slow that it became impossible to use it. We worked nearly 14 hours for the next few days just to find the bottlenecks which were causing that behavior. I believe these experiences play a very important role in developing a good engineer. Now after a year, our user base on Walletflo has exceeded 8000. I believe that my last year working on this project has helped me in becoming a better developer who not only focuses on writing code but also try to write code and solve problems to cater for the growing user base.

What benefits do you see in a remote job?

In my point of view, the benefits of working remotely are:

·   Flexible working hours so that I can work according to my convenience.

·   A lot of traveling time is saved which enables me to spend more time with my family

·   I believe that working from home increases my productivity.

·   Working with a company from the US, we have a timezone difference of about +10 hours so I had the liberty to work at night so that during my working hours the client is available to answer any questions.

·   Working remotely provides a more comfortable environment as I can personalize my workspace however I want.

Do you see any drawbacks in working remotely?

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Yes. obviously. There are a few: 

·   As I started working late at nights it completely disturbed my routine. Sleeping during the day and working at nights concerned my family and took a toll on my health and work-life balance.

·   Working hours increased for me. Being someone who starts his work every day with a goal, there were times when the working hours exceeded while trying to achieve that goal.

·   The biggest drawback was that my working hours were different from my team lead and other engineers on the project. Our communication gap grew which I believe slowed down my learning process.

·       Lack of personal connections, since I have been working remotely for the past year, when I went to the office it felt like my first day there since no one knew me there. Neither did I know anyone except for my team lead.

Finally, what are your future plans with Turing Tech? 

I have now completed my 1st year of working with Turing Tech. Working on WalletFlo has been a pleasure and I would like to continue working on it and see it grow. We have plans to integrate new technologies like SSO, Elastic Search and Plaid for transaction history in our product. This will give me the opportunity to learn something new. I have further plans to learn NextJS , CI/CD and TypeScript in the coming months so that I can gain better knowledge on other tech stacks and can be active part of product decisions from the start. I have also been assigned a trainee under me which I will be helping onboard on our mobile app. I have also requested to be included during the interview process so I can help build my team and grow the culture of hard work and learning new things.

I am looking for good frontend and backend engineers. If you think you're a good fit then apply Careers @ TuringTech.