What is the GO-JEK Engineering Bootcamp?

By Vicario Reinaldo

We invest heavily in developing and routinely training our employees. To facilitate the engineering team’s growth, we have #include Knowledge sessions from both internal and external speakers. We also have Code Retreat sessions to learn new hacks and revisit the idea of writing beautiful code.

Given our ongoing exponential growth and (regional and international) expansion plans, we are always on the lookout for brilliant minds to help us solving challenging problems. On the other hand, we believe we should take the responsibility of helping freshers adapt with our culture and practices. That’s why we established our own Engineering BootCamp.

What do we do?

The GO-JEK Engineering Bootcamp is an 8-week-intensive program to equip our newly hired junior engineers from Jakarta, Bangalore, and Singapore with the right mindset, attitude, and skillset to work in fast paced, demanding, and chaotic, working environment.

During the program, students get a hands on technical training and product engineering context, sharpen communication and collaboration skills, and get a glimpse of our business context. All sessions are delivered by senior leaders, both from the business and engineering teams. In one of the sessions, we had Nadiem come down to inspire students.

What are the topics covered?

1. Hands on technical training and product engineering context

For the first three weeks, Sidu Ponnappa, a member of the Board of Directors, and India Head, takes classes. He gives participants a hands on coding experience, disciplined engineering practices such as TDD, pair programming, code review, frequent commit, clean code, project documentation, and many more.

Sidu is directly involved in this effort because it’s important. He takes a hands-on approach because the Bootcamp acts as a definitive guide to assure success on the engineering floor.

For the next two weeks, students go through a DevOps boot camp. In GO-JEK, we push every commit to production through CI/CD. As every engineer’s dream is to push code to production, it’s really important to understand the nitty gritty of servers, importance of CI/CD, and automation. The DevOps bootcamp teaches the internals of servers and networking components, along with effective googling skills 😉

For the final three weeks, students learn about the broader product engineering context. We have Android and iOS discussions on how to build simple Android and iOS apps. We also have the UX Design Team give Design Sprint exercises to students. Not to mention, our Data Science Team flies from Singapore to teach important aspects like building a model to address fake GPS problems etc...

2. Communication and collaboration skills

Since we have 3 tech hubs (Jakarta, Singapore, and Bangalore), smooth communication and collaboration is vital. Aside from acquiring technical knowledge, we also help our students to hone these skills.

We usually start the day with discussing homework. (Yes, there’s enough homework.) We encourage some of them to present their work and the rest to give feedback.

Throughout the day we have multiple coding cycles where students familiarise themselves working in pairs. This is initially tough because it involves a lot of arguments and passionate discussions, but gives a chance to collaborate as one, to arrive at a solution.

On top of coding cycles, we also have a lot of technical and philosophical discussions. At the end of the day, candidates are given assignments to write blog posts to sharpen written communication.

We believe that personal connections matters in collaboration. Therefore, we also schedule some social events to get to know each other, and importantly, have fun!

3. Business context

In the end, our engineers deploy technical solutions to solve business problems. Therefore, we want our engineers to not only care about tech, but also about the business. During the bootcamp, we also provide context around how our business works.

We have around 20+ speakers across Jakarta, Singapore, and Bangalore to deliver sharing sessions. We get the Mobility Team (GO-CAR and GO-RIDE), GO-FOOD, and GO-PAY to share the work they do. We also have Kevin Aluwi (Our Co-Founder), Monica Oudang (CHRO), Dian Rosanti (SVP Product), Crystal Widjaja (SVP BI and Growth) and many other speakers share their business outlook.

At the end of the program, we do an assessment to determine which teams’ individuals should go to according to their proficiency in the bootcamp.

What do our students say about our program?

Our students feel that our program gives them extremely valuable experience to develop themselves as better human beings and professionals. These are some of the testimonials that we got:

What I love about this bootcamp is it was really hands-on. Each participant was encouraged to actively participate in discussion and write codes. On top of that, we’re not only levelling up our technical skills, but also honing our soft skills, especially communication and collaboration. — Ajeng Sugiarti, Product Engineer at Midtrans, Part of GO-JEK Group

You will never be same after bootcamp! It would take at least 2 years to learn all these materials in college. I learned a lot from the amazing coaches who have handled crazy scale. I also got memorable experience to study alongside people from different nationalities and background. Would highly recommend anyone to join! — Gowtham Sai, Product Engineer at GO-JEK

What’s next?

We have done 2 batches so far. The third one is happening as of now (August to October 2018) in Bangalore. We’re going to have more of these sessions across our geos soon. Indonesia is coming next!

We have good news for you! Registration is officially opened! Grab your chance here . Got any questions? Email us at academy@go-jek.com