A day in the life of a programmer at Hilsoft, Inc.

People’s impressions with programmers are always about their ability to stay up late at work staring at their screens while thinking to solve a problem.

In the real world, there’s a lot more interesting stuff that Hilsoft programmers do. Hilsoft Inc. has various projects, business models, and products that each team works on and the differences in how they execute their tasks extremely vary. This is a day in their life at Hilsoft.

Several Weeks Before Release or Deployment

A sales executive and/or a member of the implementation team send calendar invites or emails asking the programmer for job estimates on a particular product customization request or account. Some of the estimates go thru a validation process with the team leads to ensure that no tasks are over or underestimated. Tasks that take more than 4 hours to accomplish are broken down into sub-tasks to ensure a more accurate estimate.

A Week Before Release or Deployment

Each soft dev team at Hilsoft ends and begins a week with a Sprint. This is done every Friday. Each team lead closes the tasks, records KPI scores and executes retrospectives to keep each developer engaged and aligned with the company objectives. This is where the programmer commits to the jobs to be done and releases for the upcoming week. They set estimates and priorities logged on a cloud-based project tool Asana.

At times, they are called for a kickoff meeting when there are new customer sign-ups. They are invited so they can build test scripts in advance.

A typical day starts with breakfast at the workstations. Not everyone but some 🙂

They practice standup meetings and updates every 10am. This is where they discuss their roadblocks with their team leads or commit to deliver the task. At this time, before they even start coding, they should have already cleared high-level designs, test scripts, and detailed specs.

At 4pm, the programmer discusses the chances of meeting the deadline. This is where they agree to work overtime if necessary. A series of reviews and tests are also done at this period with the team lead or the implementation team.

Programmers end their day by submitting an end of day report via Asana. They report what they’ve accomplished and what they intend to accomplish the next day. This is where they also commit the codes to cloud repository, resolve code conflicts and run deployment builds.

Release Day

This is a big day for the Hilsoft programmer. Not only are they releasing what they’ve done, but more often than not, they will also face the customer. Normally, the programmers deploy the build along with the implementation team so they have nothing to worry in terms of dealing with the customer. But there are times when technical issues are raised, thus the need for their presence is implied. However, management is conscious about equipping the programmers when handling customer inquiries. Job reports and job orders are drafted and signed by the user after the release.

The Day After The Deployment

Normally, users raise several questions after deployment. The programmer will now be bombarded with a lot of technical concerns or a software release bug. It is a must that they are on standby after the release while working on some new set of tasks. That’s why it is really vital that proper QA procedures are executed. The more tedious the QA process, the less stress after deployment.

Several Months After Deployment

This is the stage where programmers are already friends with the users, most especially when the releases are stable and effective. Sales executives come in for CSAT evaluation and maintenance agreement after the warranty period.

At the end of a project lifecycle, a Hilsoft programmer is proud of their legacy in helping companies deliver their business efficiently and effectively.