Jason’s experience of onboarding at Zeal

We had the pleasure of sitting down with Zeal's Software Engineer II Jason to learn more about what his onboarding experience was like.

Jason's Stats

Full Name Jason Lee 😎

Position @ Zeal Software Developer II 💪

Hobbies I love learning new🍹cocktail recipes and traveling to new places every year

Interesting Fact When I was born, the doctor said I was a really fat baby 🐣 - so my mother enrolled me in a baby fat contest where I won 🥇st place!!

🦓 Tell us a little bit about your time at Zeal...

How long have you been working at Zeal?

I joined in October last year, so about 9 months now.

What part of the product do you work on?

Before I was working on creating reusable components, so we would use external libraries for a lot of UI components, but if we used these external libraries, we would lose flexibility - so we created our own components so we can cater them to what we needed. Now, the big thing I'm working on right now is revamping our Employee Onboarding UI to not only look great with our new components but also to make the experience intuitive & seamless for our users.

😺💻 How was your onboarding experience at Zeal?

Curious to know about how your onboarding experience was like... can you walk me through your first week at Zeal?

In my first week, I was assigned to work on the UI components. The team emphasized getting familiar with the code. I did a lot of exploring and when I had questions I could ask someone for clarification.

The best thing I enjoyed was how easy it was to get access to the code, all I had to do was 3 lines of code (clone it and run it, and then it shows up!) With that said, it was the most enjoyable part of it. ☺️

How was onboarding in the office after being remote for 2 years?

I knew it would be enjoyable, but it was a lot more enjoyable than I thought. I work remotely from LA and visit the office frequently and I love getting the energy from the team.

TLDR: when I work from home I work too much. 😂

What is 1 piece of feedback for Zeal to improve the onboarding experience?

I would recommend new hires read our new “Zeal University” documentation which outlines a lot of helpful context within the payroll space. I myself didn’t have a background in payroll, so when I went through the codebase I had some difficulty ramping up from 0-1 so I’m glad the team built out this new documentation which will be helpful for new hires in the future.

What’s something really cool you learned in your first 1-month here?

We use Storybook to create reusable components, I had never used it before. It’s a really great platform to create these UI components and has its own Sandbox which makes it easier for Sol our designer 🎨 to go in and play with it.

If you could wave a magic wand and solve anything in your work, what would it be and why?

For myself, I wouldn’t use it to fix problems but I would use it to stop time ⏳ to solve more problems. 🦸🏻‍♂️🚀

Thanks for sharing Jason, it was fun to learn more about your work and onboarding experiences and we can't wait to see how much you professionally and personally during your time here!

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