Wes Rosenberg, Chief Technical Officer for Reach Engine by Levels Beyond, speaks about engineering culture at the company in such compelling terms that he paints a picture of the role that could pass for a defense of the best impulses of the human race.
“What’s exciting about Reach Engine is that we’re using such cutting edge solutions to drive what we want to achieve for our customers,” Rosenberg adds. “There’s essentially something new out every week if not every day that you can go and apply to the software that you’re building.”
“I know for me, and for a lot of our team, that’s one of the things that is so great about working in technology, right?” he continues. “You get to play with all the new code toys! And figure out how they may apply or how you can use them to invent something new. We have a really cool workflow orchestration engine that is extremely powerful, but we’re always looking at ways to make it better, make it faster and make it stronger – like the Six Million Dollar Man.”
“Look, most people that get into software and writing code are super geeky, right?” he says with a smile. “It’s like, ‘I just want to solve this one problem. It’ll just take me a week but I don’t care because I really enjoy what I’m doing right now. So I’m just going to keep going.’ And all of a sudden it’s 11:30 at night and you’ve just worked for 18 hours, but you enjoyed yourself.”
“For a software developer, it’s important and frankly enjoyable to be able to get into that coding zone, and essentially disconnect from the rest of the team and hone that focus,” he adds.
“Solve the problem in the most efficient, fastest way, with the least amount of effort. Because then you’re saving everyone else time, too. And then somebody who’s coming in after you can maintain that code and make changes to it, and it’s less work for that person, too.”
-Wes Rosenberg
Rosenberg’s pure insight into the mind of the coder rings as clear as a bell and helps to explain the appeal of the culture at Reach Engine, and the kind of talent they like to work with.
“There’s a view that a software architect starts to build an ivory tower around themselves, and just starts to throw out ideas without any flexibility,” Rosenberg says. “I don’t agree with that approach at all. I like people to have engaging conversations that are all about punching holes through ideas. You want people that think the same way as you. Not necessarily that they agree with you about everything, but they have the same fire for learning new things in and around technology.“
“I like people being able to collaborate and talk to each other,” he explains. “My philosophy is to keep everyone engaged and talking. Even if you don’t have an answer today, that’s okay. Other people on the team might. Or maybe you can do some more research and figure it out. For the lack of a better word, this company offers a very agile environment where people have the freedom to learn and grow their skill set.”
Well before Covid-19, Rosenberg says, the team at Reach Engine learned to lean on the benefits of being a distributed workforce.
“It’s the ability for people to have the flexibility to find their own workspace, whether that’s an office or at home or in a coffee shop,” he says. “I think different people find different forums and ways to be creative. The freedom to walk out of the office and spend an afternoon down the street, outside on a patio at a restaurant, is essential sometimes to really open up your brain and think about these things.”
As for his own style of leadership, Rosenberg says his method of communicating between the C-suite and the engineers involves a series of sketches: “I like to draw a lot of pictures and diagrams. I think most of the time they speak for themselves if done correctly. For the engineering team, it defines the guard rails, but leaves enough room for them to implement what makes sense.”
He explains how the sketches deliver the most necessary info with the least amount of clutter: “I’m not here to say you need to use framework x,” he says, adding that the pictures explain with clarity that “we just need the thing to behave this way and look this way and be able to do this. You just have to satisfy those four or five things architecturally, and here are the drawings, so now you need to go and figure out what tools you need to do that.”
Rosenberg says major advice he would give himself as a younger coder, or to someone entering the engineering world, would be to “slow down.”
“When I was in my twenties, I was working 90 hour weeks. That was sort of a thing back then, maybe it still is,” he says. “Especially now that we’re all working from home, it’s really easy to just keep going. There’s no end to the day. And I think as a young software developer, you’re so eager to learn more, and you want to contribute high value to the team, and to produce solutions in a way that gets the job done. I think people like us can forget that we need time off.”
“Take your time to get it right and also to take care of yourself, because – unless you’re working in a hospital – nobody will die if it doesn’t get done by the end of the day,” Rosenberg says. “Engineers look at a problem and say ‘We can do this, and then this, and then this and this…” and those last few things are them guessing on what the first two things actually solve for. I’d rather see engineering teams just solve the first two problems, get it out there really quickly, then get fast feedback and really understand if you’re helping the customer or not.”
That method, he says, “instead of over-engineering it and trying to solve the problem that you think the customer is going to have six months from now. That’s what I think essentially drives a lot of teams to do too much work.”
Summing up with what can only be called a practical and sensible approach to what it means to work as a software engineer, Rosenberg says his method for proving yourself at Reach Engine “is to solve the problem in the most efficient, fastest way, with the least amount of effort. Because then you’re saving everyone else time, too. And then somebody who’s coming in after you can maintain that code and make changes to it, and it’s less work for that person, too.”
Reach Engine by Levels Beyond offers an oasis of true usefulness to engineers hungry for chewy problems that can lead to big results in easing the lives of others. In our modern world, this is as noble a pursuit as one can imagine, despite the seemingly humble lives of those midnight coders working around the world tonight, and every night on the next little piece they can add to a better project, product, and tomorrow.