From zero to Hybrid Hero – Jalil’s first 5 years with us

First days

Berlin, February 2017. Hybrid Heroes just recruited their first ever full-time employee: Jalil. 5 years later, he is not only still part of the team, but helped the company grow and become what it is today. He started his journey as Junior Frontend Developer, only 2 years after the company was founded. Back then he mostly worked as a frontend developer. Over the years he got more involved in backend development and architectural design, finally emerging as a fullstack lead developer.

“The way Jan and Christian approach everything is very nice and caring. It’s always about the company itself and the team. They always have every aspect in mind. When the team is happy and enjoys working at the company, then the company should also be successful, develop well and grow.”

Not only was Jalil the first full-time employee, but his first day was also the first day of Hybrid Heroes in their new office. On this day, a breakfast was arranged for him to get to meet the team: “It was a very nice day, I remember”. (To see how our onboarding process works nowadays, have a look at this blogpost).

Fast forward 5 years

Simultaneously with Jalil joining the team, business at Hybrid Heroes got more serious – direct correlation? The clients became bigger and more important, projects more challenging: “The company grew gradually with that”, Jalil remembers. Around 25 Heroes are living the Hybrid experience, among which not only developers, but project managers, designers, software testers, content marketeers. Apart from the founders Jan and Christian, everybody from the current team joined after Jalil. A true ambassador.

“I feel proud and happy that I was part of this process and how the company developed over the years. I look forward to everything that's coming in the future”.

For his anniversary, the company’s founders Jan and Christian expressed their gratefulness for his work and gave a retrospective on the past 5 years. Jalil also received a gift card for Decathlon for him to stock up his running gear. After conquering the world of development, he can now also focus on his athletic career #SupportYourLocalSportsHero.

Highlights and challenges

According to Jalil every project over the years had its own challenges, but the most challenging and influential part was the beginning of his career and being hired in the first place. As Jalil was mostly a self-taught developer at that time without much professional development experience apart from freelancing and personal projects, his biggest challenge as he states, was to build up the confidence to start working full-time in this field.

When he sees Hybrid Heroes’ job listings today, it always reminds him of how he started. “If you do this and are interested in this and are this kind of person, then we want you! That is Christian’s way of formulating job listings and I remember thinking: yes, I am interested in these things and I am this kind of person!” (Maybe you are too? Check our open positions!). In the meantime, Jalil’s highlights were and are his colleagues: “It has always been about the people”. Even when former co-workers parted ways with the company the friendships lasted.

Developers in the real world

“Last summer the team went to play beach volleyball a couple of times. It was very nice to get together and spend some time on things that are not related to work. After some time, the game got quite competitive and ‘by accident’ it turned out to be developers against project managers. On the developers’ side there was an on-going discussion regarding where players should stand and what tactics to use. People were over-engineering the thing a bit, while the project managers were waiting on the other side until one of them said ‘Do you guys need a project manager?’ It was sort of a reality check for us over-engineering things by ourselves, the developer experience in the real world.”