How to become a senior systems engineer: Ben's story

Ben Kadel - Senior systems engineer

As a senior systems engineer, I am responsible for writing code for the Android apps of Very and Littlewoods that allow people to shop using their mobile phone.

A typical day for me starts with usually a stand-up meeting with the rest of my team so that’s literally where we stand up in a circle, we tell each other about what we’ve done the previous day, what we’re doing that day and then any blockers that we might have that we can help one another out with.

After that, I’d usually go to my desk and find out what ‘tickets’ have been assigned to me. So a ticket is like a very small job, essentially, maybe write this piece of code, fix this feature et cetera and then I would get hands into the code and actually code a solution for it.

I started in university with a computer games programming degree. After that, I decided to become a teacher, so I went to do my PGCE and became an ICT high school teacher. I decided teaching wasn’t for me and I moved to Germany to become a bartender and work at a hotel and try and explore the world a little bit.

I then moved back to the UK and became an IT technician so fixing computers in high schools. After that, I actually moved back to Germany and started working at a start-up company that made fast-food apps for the entirety of Germany. And finally, I got a phone call and was actually head-hunted for an associate systems engineer role here at the Very Group, so as you can probably tell my journey wasn’t the most straight forward one!

My biggest piece of advice for anybody that’s trying to get into this industry is always be learning. That might sound a bit silly and a bit cheesy but it’s really important. The best way to become a good coder is by practising; practise, practise, practise! Have side projects that you’re constantly working on in the background. This is also incredibly important for when you’re looking to get a job. Companies, one of the first things they’ll do is ask you about side projects that you’ve worked on or look at your portfolio of things that you’ve created.

One of the biggest challenges for myself personally was I was particularly bad at maths and I was told by everyone that you needed to be amazing at maths in order to get any sort of job in the computing industry, however, I overcame this by just simply learning how to code and understanding thoroughly how computers worked and it turned out, it wasn’t a problem for me anymore.

Aside from the obvious computer science and ICT at school, theatre studies and drama was a really big help for me and showed me how to communicate to people, present and sort of build my own confidence in myself.

This is a job that I never ever even dreamed of; I never thought I would ever get a job like this. To be honest, I didn’t even know this job existed in the first place but now I’m here, I’m coding, I’m interacting with amazing people on a day-to-day basis and the job satisfaction here is phenomenal. Whenever anybody downloads the Very app onto their phone, they’ve actually got my code, something that I’ve created, right there in their hands and for me, that’s amazing, that’s why I love my job!