Jon Watkins-David

I soon had to go into a world of unrelated work but this simply reawakened my passion for coding and computers, and I just couldn’t shake it. One computer science degree later and I ended up working for a company that provided agile software development for the Department of Education, the NHS and the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

Eventually, I moved on to another company but I soon realised that my work there was too product-orientated, instead of going into a business, identifying exactly what their IT problems were, and then helping solve them. So, I decided to apply to Scott Logic because of its reputation for taking on challenging projects and producing high-quality work.

Since landing here in 2020, I’ve been assigned to a client in the mining and oil trading sector, modernising its IT systems. I am in charge of one of the four small teams working on the project and I am really enjoying being at the coalface and actually building things. It’s genuinely creative.

To deliver on targets, we deploy agile techniques delivered by these small cross-functional teams; rapid, interactive iteration, moving through small chunks of work quickly and getting feedback all the time. The approach works very well compared to the waterfall method that I had experienced when starting out as a dev. That approach sees enormous requirements documents being created upfront followed by several years of development. This can lead to a lack of flexibility and refinement during the development process.

Away from the focus on agile in our work, Scott Logic also offers a genuine sense of community. It’s really friendly at our Bristol office and even during the pandemic, this camaraderie links all our offices together thanks to our active internal chat channels. I sometimes like to think of the culture as the Scott Logic ‘Hive Mind’ where if you’ve got a particular problem, you can send it out into the wild and get an answer right back.

Most importantly, the company has proved to be the right fit for me and what I have always wanted for my career. It's also great that I’m always learning from those around me as Scott Logic is a place filled with some seriously smart people.