Life At HowNow: What’s It Like In Our Ruby on Rails Team?

What’s life like as part of HowNow’s Ruby on Rails team?

Well, with the team now at 16 members and seven of them joining in the last year, we decided it was time to get an answer to that question! 

Based in Mumbai and blessed with some truly wonderful people, we sat down with them to find out three key things:

• Why did you join and what’s it been like since?
• How have you progressed and what are the big achievements?
• And how they’d describe the culture.

Why did you join HowNow?
‍

“I wanted to work in a fast-paced start-up environment where I'll be a part of the product-building team. And that's why I love it. HowNow for me means that I get to participate, build, debate and learn so many things about the whole Product building lifecycle”

And this was a common sentiment among our Ruby on Rails (RoR), with many seeing HowNow as a leap forward in their careers.

From being given more responsibility than they’d had in a larger organisation, to taking on new tasks, HowNow offered better development opportunities. The team also shared that they love being able to openly debate on topics, sharing their ideas and challenging others. 

And these environments are where real learning happens 🧠

A few of our HowNowers joined from service based companies, so we asked them about the big differences.
‍

“You’re really able to have a voice here. I can make contributions that have a huge impact on the development of the product. Everything isn’t set in stone, so we can bring ideas and find solutions together.”

‍

Working for HowNow gives the RoR team more opportunity to make an impact, which they weren’t able to do before coming here.

And while we do have deadlines, quality is our biggest priority over speed, which leaves the team feeling far prouder of the projects they’re working on. And as they’re able to hear directly from the customers and iterate based on what they hear, it feels like they’re making something truly market leading that impacts peoples lives. 

What problems have you solved and which features have you built since joining?

From creating concurrent sessions from scratch to launching new features like our Optimised Search and Dashboards, the RoR team really are impacting the lives of L&D teams across the globe.

They’re removing major bugs to make the product slicker than ever, have launched our Skills function and continue building the integrations that make learning seamless for our customers. 

How have the team progressed since joining HowNow?

We ❤️️ hearing how our people are growing and evolving, so these three quotes brought big smiles to our faces.

“I’d seen many SQL views and queries, but hadn’t written many myself. I’ve been given the chance to stretch myself, and now I’m being a lot more proficient with SQL. MongoDB was also completely new to me before joining.” 

“Before joining, I wasn’t able to handle data. Now, I’m building features and learning to work a lot closer with other teams.”

“Massively improved my ROR skills, and learned a lot about a number of third party services - Zapier, MS Teams, Shopify, SCORM and code-writing.”

It’s just not about hard-skills though; others in the team highlighted that they’d learned to work better in teams, developing their people management, and ability to work in an agile development cycle. 

How would they describe HowNow’s culture?

Diverse views make for brilliant products and at that’s what we’re building here at HowNow!

Hiring talented individuals that vary in their demographics - socioeconomics, gender, ethnicity and others - is an important part of our future success. 

The same goes for creating an open, collaborative culture where HowNowers love coming to work, have the creative freedom to deliver their best and use that develop is how we’ll continue delivering market-leading Learning Experience Platform.

‍How about a few final quotes from the RoR team? 

“Really diverse. We’ve got people from all regions of India, and work with the UK team too. Culture is at the heart of HowNow, it’s a part of the company, whilst growing quickly!”

“Joyful, supportive and collaborative. A really open culture, where we promote transparency!”

“Friendly, diverse, and feels like a second home to me where people genuinely care for each other”

‍If you’re interested in becoming a Ruby on Rails Developer at HowNow and joining this fantastic team, check out our current vacancies here.