Work and Life at Studio 3T: Rico Dittrich

What makes a Studio 3T person work at Studio 3T? We sat down with Rico Dittrich, Software Engineering Team Lead to talk about how he came to Studio 3T three years ago and how his working life has evolved.

Dj: Every story needs a beginning, so how did you start at Studio 3T?

Rico: My wife and I had chosen Berlin to live in so I looked for jobs, and 3T was one of the companies. They were looking for senior software engineers and at that time I didn’t have that much experience but I was like “Let’s at least try. Let’s give it a shot.” After a couple of weeks Graham, one of the founders, got back to me and, and asked me, his usual questions he asked back then, like, ” Have you worked with MongoDB before?”  I had not – I had no experience with MongoDB. But I had a fair bit of SQL experience and after a few rounds of interviews I ended up here.

Life At Studio 3T

Dj: Three years later. What’s changed for you in terms of the company around you?

Rico: It’s grown. It’s grown a lot.  But I think in essence it’s, it’s still the same company. You know, it’s not like the company has changed. It doesn’t feel like we’re a company of 300 people or anything like that. We all feel very close together, so that hasn’t changed at all.

Dj: What’s your daily working environment like; how do you work at Studio 3T? And how’s that changed over the recent events?

Rico: I work from home a lot. I very much make up my own schedule. We have a dog. We go on quite a few walks during the day, and that’s always very helpful to have sort of your own schedule. Not set in stone, like, oh, you have to work from nine to five thirty or whatever. I think those are the biggest changes, just making use of the flexibility that’s being given to us.

Dj: Have you developed an online culture for remote working?

Rico: I guess everyone makes up their own online culture. And I think we’ve developed some sort of it.

Dj: There’s the #social Slack thing. The morning call, which is pretty much where everybody says “morning”.

Rico: That is true. That is a tradition that has formed. Personally, I also keep up with the sports channel that we have. Every now and then, go for a run, just post about it there, get support, get motivation, and just talk about that kind of stuff.

Dj: How did you find that channel?

Rico: Oh, I didn’t. We got a treadmill, I mentioned it and was introduced to the channel.

Developing at Studio 3T

Dj: How about the tools you use to collaborate during your work day at Studio 3T?

Rico: Leigh [our Product Manager] introduced me to Miro, a kind of online whiteboard and we used it for developing Team Sharing feature quite extensively. Personally I use reclaim.ai to schedule my days essentially. Reclaim luckily blocks out lunchtime for me. Otherwise there would’ve been days before where I wouldn’t have been able to eat lunch. Otherwise I just write down what I have to do and whether it’s in tickets or whether it’s in my notebook where things get quite messy and I start ticking things off.

Dj: And Java?

Rico: Oh, yes, it’s always been Java. That is also how I ended at Studio 3T. Otherwise I wouldn’t have applied. Java was a stepping stone for me. I wanted to do Java and I wanted to continue doing it. 

Dj: I’m going to ask, would you consider Java skills one of the utterly essential requirements? 

Rico: I think object-oriented programming is one of the essential requirements. Coming from C# you can probably learn Java pretty easily. So object-oriented programming, I think is the most important requirement.

Dj: And MongoDB experience?

Rico: I had done some SQLite before. I was working with a company manufacturing network switches. They used embedded Linux there and they used a lot of SQLite to store all the configuration parameters. That’s where I got my SQL experience. But no MongoDB experience. That’s something I had to acquire myself. And 3T pretty much said, yeah, we don’t care. As long as you have some kind of database experience and you understand what the database does, you can learn the rest. And that’s how it ended up being.

I think the biggest quality we look for in a developer is simply being able to understand, to learn new things. You know, you can learn any technology. We all learned Java at some point. And we all learned SWT at some point. And we all learned MongoDB at some point. That’s just a matter of, can you comprehend these things or not.

Evolving at Studio 3T

Dj: What’s next for you? Where would you like to evolve and how is Studio 3T helping you evolve?

Rico: When they promoted me to the position where I would be able to take ownership of different projects, of different components within the application, I was very happy. And I’m still very happy being essentially “just” a team lead. I have no need to evolve for now because I’m just satisfied.

Dj: So what would be your elevator pitch for someone looking to work at Studio 3T?

Rico: If you want an international and open culture, I think you’re in the right spot here. If you want your code changes to actually make a difference, you’re also in the right place. We ship out so many things in so many releases in a year. Everyone contributes something and it doesn’t get lost in the void. I don’t know when I last saw a PR (pull request) being declined simply because we decided to scrap what someone had been working on. I think if everything someone works on just makes it into the app, into the code base, that’s a major difference compared to other companies.