Engineering projects inspired by the Common Good: interview with Software Engineer Bobby Priambodo

The contents of this article are as of April 4, 2022.

After Graduating from Universitas Indonesia with a Computer Science degree, Bobby started his career as a software engineer at a small career education startup in Indonesia, Bukapintu. He then joined Traveloka, an Indonesian tech unicorn in the Travel and Lifestyle space. He worked there for four years, during which time he was responsible for the Accommodation Search system. There, he transitioned from individual contributor to the leader of a small team of engineers, focusing both on system scalability and developer experience. In December 2020, Bobby joined the Engagement Backend product engineering team at SmartNews. In his free time, he loves to travel, try out new food, go to amusement parks, and play the piano.

Q: What team are you working on here at SmartNews?

I'm currently in the engagement backend team.

Q: What is this team responsible for?

The engagement backend team is basically the team where we work on features that keep our users engaged while using the SmartNews app. Basically, the main use case of people using SmartNews is that they open it, they read some news, and they continue on with what they were doing, so I think to realize our mission of delivering quality information, we can actually do something to keep them engaged. And also to present more information to them in a way that is not disruptive, not pervasive, but still be useful for them.

Q: What are some of the technical challenges that your team faces, and why are they interesting?

One of the challenges I think that we face is that, for example, for a certain project, we were dealing with assets like user-generated content in the form of photos and videos. I think that is something that hasn't really been done in SmartNews before. Or previously, it was done, I think, maybe five or six years ago if I remember correctly. So that was one of the challenges: how can we maintain and manage terabytes of user photos and videos into something that is still performant in our app, that will not slow down our app or bring down our users' experience.

Also, during the development of the reaction and commenting feature, we were dealing with the traffic that the news team is currently serving, which, in layman's terms, is a lot. So the challenge was how we could develop something that could receive that much traffic while still being as performant as possible and delivering the best experience to our users.

Q: You joined SmartNews not too long ago, but of the projects you’ve worked on so far, what’s been the most enjoyable or challenging thing you’ve done so far?

I kind of mentioned this earlier, but of the projects I’ve been able to work on so far, the most challenging and interesting has been the U.S. vaccination project. As you know, SmartNews had several vaccination-related projects in the US and Japan. I was involved with the US project. Basically, we were trying to build an app that allows users to find their nearest vaccination center based on where they live. The first point that was interesting to me was that even the existence of this project was a realization of lots of our core company values, like “for the common good.” We're doing this so that people can more easily find places to get the vaccine in this situation. That’s the first reason. The second reason is that this is the first project for which I was the so-called project leader for the engineering part. So when I say project leader, it was actually a team of two plus the PM, but still, I wanted to discuss things with the PM, like how we will deliver this? How will we distribute the timelines? How will we distribute the tasks between the engineers? I think that experience left a pretty good impression on me during the past six months.

Q: Before joining SmartNews, you were working at an established, successful tech unicorn in Indonesia. What are some of the differences between your previous company and SmartNews?

Surprisingly, culture-wise, there hasn't been any significant difference in that, I think, at least in the tech culture. At least as SmartNews, we're kind of like San Francisco-oriented, like almost all the startup cultures. We’ve adopted some similar approaches where we're pretty much open to anything, being agile and trying to figure out how we can solve such-and-such a problem quickly. So speaking of the culture itself, it's really not that much different.

Q: When SmartNews gave you an offer of employment, did you have any hesitations about accepting?

During that time, I had two offers: one from SmartNews and the other from a company in Singapore. One of the hesitations was that if I went to Singapore, I would be closer to my home country and, therefore, could go back pretty often. But then again, as I mentioned before, the motivation to go to Japan basically beat all of the other hesitations that I had. I also think that had the offer been from a different Japanese company and not SmartNews, I would have been concerned about the company having a stereotypically Japanese company culture. But after listening to the stories about SmartNews from the interviewers and also the recruiters, I think it was kind of an obvious choice.

Q: Are there any stereotypes about Japanese companies in Indonesia?

Right. I've gotten this a few times, even from my family member,s when I told them I might be moving to Japan to work, right? Some of the stereotypes would be that you work long hours, you don't really have good work-life balance, and that there will be lots of nomikai (semi-mandatory after-hours drinking parties with colleagues and superiors). I think those stereotypes are pretty well known even outside of Indonesia and outside of Japan as well.

Q: How has your experience after joining SmartNews compared with the reality of working here?

Working at SmartNews is like the opposite of those stereotypes. We don't work long hours. We're encouraged to do work during the usual work hours. There's also the term flexible working hours, where you decide when you will start and end work. For most engineers, that is a godsend because we quite often work late at night and wake up late as well. I also think the work-life balance is pretty good. We're given many paid leaves, and when we're on leave, we don't often get disturbed by work-related stuff. For example, I think I heard this from our manager, but during a conversation, our manager had with his manager, that person said, “If you have family matters, like if your child is performing in a play or something, then please prioritize that instead of work.” So I think even from that short conversation, I can actually feel the difference in the mentality here at SmartNews. I'm pretty grateful for that.