Why are we a (the) place to work for?


Posted by Willy-Peter Schaub on Fri 22 April 2022

Safe and healthy workplaces. Compassionate and responsive service.

I could take a shortcut and refer you to the WorkSafeBC Top Employer 2022 article. It showcases why WorkSafeBC was voted as a top employer in 2022, during the challenging Covid pandemic.

Instead, I will emphasize the humbling mission that fuels me with energy every day - "Prevent workplace injury, illness, and death, and support injured workers through fair compensation and effective rehabilitation." - and introduce WorkSafeBC through the lens of our vibrant EDO Common Engineering team.


Through the lens of the common engineering team

Confused

WIIFM? First, you will be part of a team that is curious but despises TLAs (three-lettered acronyms). We prefer the question "what is in it for me" instead of "WIIFM" - it is clear and avoids confusion, awkward pauses, and Google'ing. See Why I loathe when engineers use TLAs, such as CD vs CD! for details.

We are a diverse family of engineers, working in one or more of three functional roles. Pathfinders are engineers that are part of shared services we rotate through software engineering teams to share their experience and bring real-world learnings back to our team. These rotations can last from hours to months, fostering curiosity and T-shaped engineering.

Benefits?

  • Collaboration (SILO antidote)
  • Continuous learning
  • Faster delivery
  • Productivity

Other functional roles include the delivery of exceptional Operations support and continuous innovation and improvement of our common engineering ecosystem by Platform Advancement. All three functional roles are equally important - without a balance, we cannot continuously deliver value!

EDO Ce

Our team is based on leadership at every level of the functional role and every member of our crew, encouraged to self-organize and self-manage. We value autonomy, transparency, and simplicity. For example, every engineer is empowered to question a process and experiment by removing steps that appear to add no value. One of our main pillars is TRUST - we trust each other and what we do!

Benefits?

  • Decentralized management (Micro-management antidote)
  • Resilience allowing team to withstand adversities, such as the Covid pandemic.
  • Shorter lead and cycle times.
  • Simple solutions are easier and cheaper to maintain - engineers can go home earlier and experience less annoying 2-AM calls.

Evolution

WorkSafeBC presents a technology heaven for engineers. The diverse world of processes and products, ranging from the classic to bleeding edge technology, ensures that every engineer is continuously learning and pushing the boundaries of integration.

Here are some of the exciting process and product adventures planned for 2022 as part of the common engineering ecosystem, sorted from most to least exciting (through my lens):

  • Automate everything automatable and empower with Self-Service Automation.
  • Azure DevOps environment that is based on self-service automation, config- and pipeline-as-code.
  • Second generation Yet Another Markup Language (YAML)-based Application-Type Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Delivery (CD) Pipeline Blueprints.
  • Hypothesis driven development and embrace failure as an opportunity to innovate.
  • Embrace cloud native computing (watch this space for a related article by my colleague Sergiy), containerization and orchestration for the right workloads.
  • Azure Services and Service Fabric Orchestrator as a development platform.
  • More QUALITY, less WASTE!
  • Continuous experimentation, viewing failures as an opportunity to learn.
  • Behaviour Driven Development (BDD).
  • Domain Driven Design (DDD).
  • Test-driven Development (TDD).
  • Reducing waste and optimizing meetings.
  • SHIFT << Left, empowering delivery teams and performing validation scans, such as security, quality, and guardrails, as early as possible.
  • SHIFT Right >>, using configuration-as-code and committing to delivery configuration as late as possible.
  • People first mindset.
  • Vibrant collaboration, creating invaluable bridges and busting SILOs.
  • Using animated whiteboard software to create crisp, informative, and fun process and product awareness videos.
  • Application Programming Interface (API), Mobile, Performance, and User Interface testing.

  • Flutter-based mobile apps.

Bleeding Edge

When you rotate into the role of Platform Advancement you are not only automating everything automatable, running continuous experiments, but also spending a lot of time with forward and long-term thinking.

Smile

Crafting tomorrow's world is often a daunting task - however, there is no better feeling to see your idea being launched and creating a smile on every stakeholder's face.

We have an ambitious vision to empower all engineers and to practice and promote the mindset of continuous experimentation where failure is viewed as a positive opportunity to learn and innovate.

You will find this and other Elon's quotes all over our blogs, presentations, portals, and documentation:

"Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough." - Elon Musk

Failure

Last, but not least - we have the option to work at the office, at remotely from home, or both. Autonomy, self-organization, self-management, and flexibility!

I hope that this has given you a sneak peek into our team and the world of engineering in our group at WorkSafeBC.

We are looking for flexible and passionate engineers

Interested in our world? If yes, we currently have position in our Platform Advancement area for an Software Engineering Practices Lead and Quality Assurance Lead. In both cases you would enable our common engineering ecosystem, to shift across multiple disciplines to create a place where the highest standards are maintained, and provide vision, direction, and guardrails (governance).

Keep an eye on my Twitter and LinkedIn channels for posts such as this for more details on the opportunity.

Ping me any time - I would love to collaborate with you!