Applying 5 Gojek’s Insightful Tips in My Life
“… and it wasn’t social intelligence, it wasn’t good looks, physical health, and it wasn’t IQ, it was grit” — Angela Lee Duckworth
To survive and thrive in Gojek, I, as a new hire, was given 5 insightful tips on my first day.
- Grit
- Curiosity
- Learning agility
- Humility — me vs. we
- Responsible adult
From those tips, there is one tip that really caught my eye: Grit.
Grit
Every time I saw Gojek’s engineer vacancy in job portals, I always said to myself, “One day, I’ll do the Gojek test.”; “I’m not ready yet.”; “Nope, Ay, you won’t pass the test now. You still need to study more!” Until one day, when I was so tired of being ‘ghosted’ by several jobs that I applied, I tried to finish Gojek online test. “Well, I’ll never know the result if I never try.” I mumbled.
Finishing Gojek’s recruitment test, to me, is really an achievement. But, what is more than that is starting to do the Gojek’s online test and the perseverance to do my best throughout the test phase.
To me, my friend, that is grit.
Even though Grit is something that really get my attention, I will still discuss the other tips that I implemented during my first week as Gojek new hire.
Curiosity
On the on boarding session, which is on the first day I worked at the office, I got a chance to meet my buddy at Gojek. It was surprising to me, since I am placed in a division that I’ve never used any technology of it and he told me that the division itself is still new in Gojek Indonesia. Knowing that popped out lots of questions in my head. What should I learn to be able to know the technology? Will we move to Bangalore or Singapore? What does it feel like living in Bangalore? and other questions that I’m sure if I list them all this writing will be just questions :|
Yes. I was terrified. But then, I asked him things that terrified me, and every time I got the answers for my questions, my mind became calmer. By the end of the buddy-meeting session, I felt more relaxed and couldn’t wait to google all the new stuffs and terms I got from my buddy.
New things are terrifying sometimes, but when I really put attention to it and delve into all my questions, I get calmer and eager to learn.
Learning agility
With your curiosity, in order to truly understand new things, you need the will to learn.
It’s not just learning. It’s learning agility. It’s learning in ‘fast pace’.
During my first week in Gojek, I got an assignment to study 2 programming languages and read 2 books to prepare myself for bootcamp. One of the programming language that I learnt was really new to me, it’s Ruby. Actually, the source for studying Ruby is abundant on the internet. Well, that abundance somehow gave me two things, the source for me to study and the confusion of where I should start to study. But then, I decided to just start learning Ruby and voilà, I began to understand well about it.
Even though I was focusing on learning new programming language, I still had to manage myself to read 2 books, The Pragmatic Programmer and Clean Code. I’m not really into reading books, but fortunately I could finally manage myself to read those books willingly.
Reading books might sometimes become boring, but when I try to organize myself and start reading when I need to kill time, reading becomes my friend.
Humility
It’s not always about you. One of the Gojek values that is very related to this tip.
On my first week as a new hire, Gojek provided a sharing session about Agile Exercise. My friends and I was divided into 3 groups and each of group had to build a mini zoo using legos. It was fun yet it was challenging. We needed to apply agile software development life cycle into our building zoo mechanism. We needed to discuss and negotiate with each of the group member in order to reach the zoo’s goal.
After the short time of building zoo and the tough negotiation and discussion, fortunately, my group was able to reach the zoo’s goal!
I was thankful that all my group members were really cooperative. I believe that if one of us was stubborn enough and only thought about the only things that he/she wanted to do, the zoo’s goal would never be achieved.
Responsible adult
Gojek really gives its employees the freedom to work at wherever they want — as long as not meeting clients and teams — Gojek gives this flexibility in order to ease its employees.
But this flexibility comes with great responsibility.
I was a little surprised when I was told that I didn’t need to work at the office during my first week. At first, I was thrilled, but then I was confused since I hadn’t found my own pace of learning and studying the given tasks.
Thank God, Gojek created metrics for their new hire product engineers. Even though sometimes I struggled in managing my own time to study, I always looked into the metrics and counted how many of it that I’d achieved. It wasn’t just that, I was able to see my other friends achievement too. That was somehow motivated me to achieve more and ask things that difficult me to others who had understood it better.
My first week as a new hire product engineer in Gojek was exciting. I tried to adapt myself and find my own pace of learning.
It’s never been easy to try something new, but with the 5 tips above that Gojek tells me, I believe I can learn everything.
