Epsor

<p><strong>Juliette Xie knows a lot about responsible corporate savings. Not because the young full-stack developer at Epsor is close to retirement: she’s curious and savvy, and works in a fintech company with a social vocation for which employee retirement savings and a sustainable development of our planet are just as important!</strong></p><h1>At Epsor, You Work for People’s Golden Years in a Meaningful World</h1><h2>Test and Learn… Choose Tech</h2><p>Working in data was never a dream of mine. Dare I say it, in high school, the field wasn’t even on my scope: I wanted to become an engineer after I graduated…&nbsp;</p><h3>Meeting My Path</h3><p>I fell into this universe by mere chance: with some of my schoolmates that were as undecided as I felt, we went to Epitech’s Open House Day. To my surprise, I liked what I saw there. I then was offered to spend a full day with a student-mentor and she introduced me to coding. When I realized that this activity required long hours of extreme focus, I could have felt overwhelmed. Yet, once again, I sensed that it could be the right path for me, and I went for it!</p><h3>Hands-on and Internships: A School for Real Life&nbsp;</h3><p>My school feels very strongly about professionalizing students from the end of their first year. Internships are non-negotiable and I was immediately thrown into the big sea of the workplace. The full-proof method to overcome beginners’ fears: year one, a six-month internship, then a part-time ‘real job’, and another full-time internship at the end of the third year. It’s also a great way to explore and find one’s affinities and preferences.&nbsp;</p><p>You don’t necessarily need to go through the internship route, in my view. For some people, it might be the better path, letting them dip their toes into companies before the big plunge. But others are confident and clear about what they want early on; it totally depends on your personality.&nbsp;</p><p>At the end of my fifth year, I began my last and final internship, at Epsor. Two years in, I’m still with the company and loving it!</p><h2>In the Land of Epsor: Data, Retirement … and Enthusiasm!</h2><p>When I started with the firm, I knew absolutely nothing about Epsor, or finance: hearing of corporate savings, PEI, PER, etc., felt a bit eery to me, to say it mildly! I wasn’t sure that I could maintain interest in the long run. Finance, from the outside, lacks attractiveness, glamour, can look scary, even. Epsor changed my mind!</p><p>Our product is truly innovative: a comprehensive and intuitive website, with a sleek design and many options for – mostly – companies eager to offer their employees saving plans with a soul. I feel that I’ve got pretty savvy myself, regarding savings and best practices. Although I’m on the Tech side of things, I love to work in a business where ethics, sustainability and transparency of investment funds matter. This mindset drives the company. Recently, we’ve become an ‘Entreprise à Mission’, which is unheard of in our field in France, and we’re working hard to become BCorp certified. It’s great to work for an enterprise as in tune with today’s environment and ethical concerns as Epsor.</p><h3>Full-stack Dev… As in Multitasker</h3><p>I’m a full-stack developer. At Epsor, that means that you’re not assigned a predefined role. We’re a large team of developers and we aim to be ‘interchangeable’. Of course, this isn’t entirely true, or even doable; we have specificities and topics of predilection, but we work closely with one another and it’s important that we can back each other up with our tasks.&nbsp;</p><p>We all work together on diverse segments of the product, cleaning bugs, solidifying our code base, or adding new features when necessary. Full-stack devs are multitaskers by nature: we work on the design of the features, the front part of the application, as well as making sure that the process goes smoothly for the final user, and that’s pretty much what we work on in the back-end.</p><h3>Days in the Life of a Full-Stack Developer</h3><p>I enjoyed working at Epsor at once: I found challenging projects, great teammates and a vibrant company with a new and exciting product. There’s so much to build, to invent, to improve! And I love working within a larger crew – until Epsor, I had mostly interned in small startups with limited workforce and tiny Tech teams – . When I joined, we were already a dozen, and now, we’re about 25, all with diverse profiles and brains of our own: It makes for good emulation and exchanges. It’s also pretty cool to mingle with people with greater experience and to be able to seek advice and learn from them. We should all keep a teachable mind…</p><h3>Challenges and Learning Curves</h3><p>We’ve been faced with some exciting challenges since I arrived. We had to master many tasks at once, get organized and be proactive instead of reacting and fearing deadlines. We’ve redesigned our roadmap and learned to answer the clients’ demands effectively and swiftly. For a couple of our offers, we had to rethink and redesign the best part of our data, dancing, in a way, between older features and code and new ones that the product required. It’s more difficult than building an entirely new feature. Deadlines were short and days long, and we made quite a few back and forth, but I enjoy a good challenge: I feel a bit proud that we made it! Plus, trying to work at a smoother pace and with more realistic deadlines, allowed us to improve our operations all over, and that’s a good, a very good thing.</p><h2>The way ahead for Tech … and I</h2><p>To be happy in Tech and a good dev, aside from the obvious competences in whatever language you’re working with, you need a very simple set of skills: rigour, humbleness, team spirit and logical thinking.</p><h3>Reflecting on my Journey So Far</h3><p>From the start, I never felt that being a woman was a problem. Maybe it’s because, even in high school, I was surrounded with mostly men; I’m used to it.</p><p>More than seven years in the Tech field, I have zero regrets. When I started school, I didn’t have the slightest idea of the variety of job opportunities. Yes, some things can feel a little scary: we all know – unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock – about the fast-paced development of the IA. Some people are afraid that the machine will replace humanity and frankly, we already see this happening in a number of cases. But I love my job and my work environment: whether you’re a Dev or working on the IA, challenges and good adrenaline keep you on your toes. You really have to enjoy the job if you want to keep up: I do!&nbsp;</p><p>At Epsor, we can evolve and follow our affinities: not everyone wishes -or even is destined – to embrace a managerial role. Some do, but others prefer to become experts in their field, and both are encouraged here. I love to be ‘hands-on’, so I’d rather become an expert in my discipline. At least that’s what rocking my boat for now…</p><h3>Five Years From Now</h3><p>Sometimes, I reflect on the next steps of my life: I wonder if I’ll still be a dev when I’m 40, with all the uncertainty, intensity, irregular schedules, etc. In five years, I may change paths and start anew with something completely different, a new career. When and if the time comes, I’ll know it. Here and now, I feel exactly where I want to be.&nbsp;</p>

In the Land of Juliette: Epsor, Data, Retirement … and Enthusiasm!

Team 50inTech