Trying different paths before finding the right one.

The choice to study Frontend development wasn’t the first path Elias tried. He started his studies in Software engineering, then tried Product Technology, and moved on to IT-security before deciding to go all in for Frontend Development. During his studies in Frontend Development, he was offered an intern position at Hailey HR.

"My supervisor Fredrik, Frontend team lead, introduced me very well in to our ways of working. Code is black and white, and you need to know a lot. So no matter which company you join, it will always take time to understand everything"

Elias describes the difference in the ways of working in school compared to working at Hailey, and explains how school focused primarily on understanding fundamentals and web development frameworks, whilst at Hailey, it is more focused on how to build good quality code that is scalable, maintainable and readable.

"That’s where the architecture and system design comes in. We didn’t learn a lot about that in school. I recognize a lot of it since I’m pretty nerdy, but the main things that I learned is how to apply software design patterns and principles. It’s not possible to build scalable software if you don’t have a structure or a system for it"

The artistry of Frontend development

Elias describes the role of a Frontend developer as a translation of all raw data to something visually pleasing and pleasant to interact with. This could for example be raw data from our backend developers about a person logged in to our Hailey HR-system, that the frontend developers needs to translate into something visual that person can interact with.

"The best part of frontend development is that you code visual things, you can be an artist with code"

Teamwork is A and O in the agile ways of working

The Development department works in teams with a good balance between Frontend developers and Backend developers. During 3 weeks, the teams work in a sprint where they start with a general planning for all developers. When the focus areas has been defined, the developers can choose which teams they want to work with for the 3 week sprint.

"Each team focuses on their thing, and you choose which team you want to work with, which is very nice since you can do whatever you think is fun"

Elias describes the general approach in Development as “learning by doing”. When he started at Hailey, he sat down with another developer and spent the whole days coding and get a first understanding of how code works at Hailey.

"Programming as a profession is a lot of trial and error. You need to constantly learn and try new ideas and solutions. It is a very team oriented profession, you constantly do problem solving, review other peoples code, get feedback on your code and iterate. One thing that we value is that everyone understands the code, its structure & where you place things, the logic behind it, keeping it simple and naming things in an understandable manner"

An accepting culture

Elias describes the culture at Hailey HR as accepting. With lectures in psychological safety, he thinks that his manager Lotta has contributed a lot to the accepting culture. People’s personalities and interests differs a lot in the organisation, and everyone is welcomed.

"It’s very mixed, we have some nerdy people, a lot of people that likes exercising, a lot of people like to just hang out, and a lot of people plays ping pong - people are damn good at it. It's a quite the challenge to win!"

Further on, Elias describes the culture at the Development department as a well balanced between fun and professional.

"It's obvious that the people here at Hailey are developing because they enjoy it. What we're developing is fun. A belief of mine is that if you have fun while creating anything, you will naturally create something of higher quality. If I don't find what I create fun, the code won't be as good as it could be"

Interested in Development at Hailey? Connect with us for future opportunities!