How we care for the development of our employees – an interview with Krzysiek from Spartans team

From Customer Support to Spartans team for the position of Quality Assurance – this is how Krzysiek’s career developed in Metapack.

Internal recruitment is something we do frequently, and Metapackers use it to improve their qualifications. Read an interview with Krzysiek and learn about the development opportunities we offer.

Krzysiek, what team do you work in and what are you responsible for?

I work in the Spartans team as a Quality Assurance Engineer. My task is to ensure that the result of the code operation is consistent with what analysts have agreed with clients and at the same time does not cause unwanted changes in other application functionalities. You have to test whether what the programmers create is resistant to unexpected situations, i.e. incorrect input data, and whether the solution is efficient enough and will not cause delays in the operation of the entire application.

One of my responsibilities is also to prepare automatic tests for the modules I create. These tests are run every day and are mainly used to check whether programmers’ modifications in other modules do not cause changes in the part of interest to us. There are a lot of tools for testing, because there is no universal one, and you have to check the code from different sides. The main tool is SOAPui, Postman, Gatling, but we can also look for others that will help us check the area of ​​interest.

You took this position as part of internal recruitment. How did it go and how does such an internal change of responsibilities usually look like?

Less than two years ago, I joined Metapack in Customer Support. I liked the job, but there was an announcement about an internal recruitment for the position of Quality Assurance Engineer to the new development team. Out of curiosity, I went to an information meeting with people who already play such a role and it turned out that it could be something interesting that I would enjoy and what would allow me to develop further. The company supports internal recruitment, the only thing I had to do was to inform the current leader about the willingness to change the position. I took part in the recruitment and I made it ????

How long have you been working on the new position?

I started working in the new team at the beginning of December. Earlier, it took about 2-3 weeks to move between teams, transfer open topics, I trained a new person, and in the meantime I participated in the prepared onboarding for the new department, but I am permanently in the new team for less than three months.

So, in fact, while working in Metapack doing one job in a given department, you can apply for another at any time, in a completely different area?

Yes, there is no problem with that. From time to time, internal recruitment is announced, but of course you can also take part in external recruitment. You just have to go to the HR department and find out if you can apply for a given position.

How did the members of the previous and new team react to this change? How did they say goodbye and welcome you?

The previous team was very supportive, and the new one welcomed me warmly. I don’t feel alienated in any way, we have a nice, friendly atmosphere.

Metapack is a big company. Have you dealt with the team you joined as part of your duties at Customer Support before, or did you meet its members only now, after you switched teams?

Working in support is fun like that it allows you to meet a lot of people from different teams. If there is a bug in the application, then depending on what it concerns, we can cooperate with programmers or implementers. Together we try to find out what happened. Working in support you have the opportunity to get to know the entire company. I got to know the people of my new team by working together on tickets.

At the moment you have moved to a new team to develop your skills. Do you have any other goals for the future? Any plan you intend to pursue in the coming years?

For now I will do my best as a QA Engineer. In this position, I will have access to development tools and the opportunity to learn and work on the code. If I enjoy doing it, the position of a programmer will probably be the next stage of my development.

So you can stay here longer?

I want to stay here longer, certainly, because of the people and the nice atmosphere. I also care about working with new technologies and tools, which are our norm, small enterprises do not always have access to such services as AWS, Kibana, New Relic, and they are the future in this industry.