Moving On To Liberty Mutual

After weeks of reflection and learning, I decided to take a position at Liberty Mutual.

I spent about a year at CoachUp. It was the highlight of my professional career. I learned a lot about software, design patterns, agile, and the craft of writing software. I wanted to continue learning and taking steps towards the next level of my personal development.

When I left CoachUp, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was working towards. I reflected. I talked to friends. I sat down with mentors. I dreamed. And what resulted, was that I decided I was working towards becoming a CTO at a venture-backed startup.

Distilling this down into actionable skills, I decided that I needed to find position where I would have an opportunity to grow into a leadership role, to recruit team members into the organization, to work with really smart developers, and to have a platform to speak at more events.

I interviewed at many companies – big and small – in the Boston area, looking for the right opportunity that had everything on my list. When the dust settled and I sorted through offers, I decided to join Liberty Mutual. It checked all the boxes. It’s also a really cool place to work.

Here are some of the highlights.

Why Liberty Is Awesome

Training Liberty truly values personal development. In the few weeks I’ve been at Liberty, I have been trained in agile, TDD, extreme programming, pair programming, and the MERN stack. We also get Pluralsight subscriptions so we can continue learning at home.

We work at WeWork They have La Colombe coffee for free at WeWork. I’m a coffee snob – having La Colombe Coffee is a big deal!  They also have “fruit water” (ice water with watermelon/lemon/grapefruit/limes/etc). They also have free toothbrushes in the bathrooms. There are 2 taps in the kitchen. There’s also no dress code. WeWork is awesome.

Modern Frameworks All the code you write at Liberty will probably be on the MERN (Mongo/Express/React/Node) stack. If you’re like me, you’re a full stack developer that hasn’t had a large focus on Javascript and asynchronous patterns. It’s been really cool to learn this new software paradigm. I have always used Javascript, but now I’m taking my knowledge to another level.

Design Thinking Approach. A lot of companies preach talking to customers regularly, but few actually do. I’m part of an agile team that is going through a lot of customer interviews. We’re building user personas based on the results. Then we’re going to build minimum viable products to solve those specific issues.

Truly Following Agile I’ve been at a lot of places where we went through the motions of agile. We did standups and retros for the sake of doing standups and retros. At Liberty, each agile team is self-organizing and they make up their own team norms. We check back on what has and hasn’t worked, and make changes to our process after each sprint.

Speaking Opportunities Liberty is growing its Boston development presence. They want people who want to grow their personal profile in the organization. If you plan on becoming a more well-known figure in the Boston tech scene, Liberty is a great place to be.

 

We’re Hiring

I know everyone puts this at the end of their posts, but we’re hiring a lot of people very soon. Specifically, we’re looking for full stack developers (language doesn’t matter, but we’ll be writing code in MERN stack – mostly React and Node) and front-end developers.

If you are interested in exploring opportunities at Liberty, I’d love to speak to you. Connect with me on Linkedin (http://linkedin.com/in/cavezza) or send me an email

If you’re interested in finding a new gig and have no interest in Liberty, I’d love to talk to you, too! There’s two reasons: (1) I learned a lot about job hunting over the last few months and can help you land the job you want and (2) your perception of Liberty probably isn’t accurate and I’d love to give you the lowdown – the good and the bad about software at Liberty. You should also connect with me on LinkedIn (http://linkedin.com/in/cavezza) or send me an email.

Lookout for more posts on the iBuildMVPs blog about job searching over the next few weeks.