Welcome to the ASOS Tech podcast, where we're continuing to share what it's like to work inside a global online fashion company. You may have bought some clothes from us, but have you ever wondered what happens behind the screen? I am Jennifer Friar. I am an engineering manager within the AI and data science team. My pronouns are she, her, and I have been at ASOS nearly two years, which I'm very excited by.

My name is Sean Coyle. I'm an android engineer at the Northern Ireland Tech Hub, and I've been here for just over one year, and my pronouns are he, him.

Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us, Sean. Really excited to get to know you a little bit better in this day in a life of podcasts. As always, we're going to start with an icebreaker. I had lots of fun researching and finding some different types of icebreakers, and this is one of my favorites. So, are you ready?

I'm ready.

Good. What is the strangest place you've fallen asleep?

I think it has to be. I was in Europe with some friends, and I had a really long overnight train from Austria to Rome, and I had to share a cabin with three teenagers I didn't know. I didn't get any sleep because they were just so loud all night. And then when I arrived in Rome, I was so tired, I went to the cafe to grate a coffee, and I don't know what happened. I just fell asleep, and with my face against the window, like, the front window. And then whenever I woke up, there was two girls, two tourists, standing there, like, taking photographs off me with the flashes on. And it woke me up, and then I jumped and screamed, and then I scared them, and then they jumped and screamed. And you know when you wake up and you're, like, really disorientated and you don't know what's going on, and you're just seeing camera flashes. I was like, what's happening?

Who takes a photo of a sleeping person? Oh, my God. That is a brilliant story of the trash lady falling asleep. Amazing. Thank you so much. I feel like I know you better now. That was incredibly useful. Thank you. So we're talking a day in a life of. So now we know that you can fall asleep in coffee shops in Rome. Let's move on to tech. So we'll start with a nice, easy one, hopefully. So how did you get into tech?

It was about five years ago, so quite late on. I was 33 at the time. I decided to do a career change, and the university here in Belfast, they offer what's called like, a conversion master's degree course. So it's a master's degree, but it's aimed at people who have no background in tech whatsoever, and it allows you to retrain and sort of pivot into this career. So it was from doing that conversion course that actually led me into tech, but I had quite a different background before that. It was quite a journey to get here. I feel like I've lived a few different lives before I arrived at ASOS.

You can't say that and not tell us what your few different lives are that you lived before you joined ASOS. Come on, tell us what you used to do.

Yeah, so I probably didn't follow the standard route. So I left school at 18, and then I moved to Australia, and I lived in Melbourne for a year. And I was just, like, doing the work and holiday thing over there. And then whenever I returned home, I wanted to go to university. So I studied for two years doing an access course in psychology, and that sort of got me into university. And then I did. My first degree was in environmental planning. So my favorite subject of school was geography. So that's kind of how it led me into that. However, whenever I was graduating, the world economy had just collapsed at that point, as you probably remember.

I know that pain.

There was no jobs, and so I decided I needed to do something else. So in the final year of that course, I was volunteering a lot in mental health on the student campus. We would do, like, a lot of different activities and programs trying to raise awareness of mental health in students, because a lot of people think students go to university and have three years of good times. But it's not always like that, because a lot of people leave their small town and are now isolated by themselves in a city away from all of their family and support. So I was really enjoying that kind of work. And so I retrained and went back and did a degree in social work. So I was actually a social worker before I got into tech, so I worked in Child Protective services and I did that. It was, as I'm sure you can imagine, it was quite a difficult job. So after a while of doing that, I kind of took a break and I moved to Japan for two years, where I worked as an English teacher in a high school. I couldn't speak any Japanese when I first arrived, and no one spoke English, but it was a really, really fun time. I absolutely loved it. Yeah, it was quite a journey, but it was when I came back from Japan, I did one more year in social services. And then I applied to do that master's degree, and then that's what kind of led me here.

That is the most amazing journey and did so much more than I was expecting, I have to say. I'm just about to adopt a child, so I can imagine what being a social worker in child protective services can be like, because we have spoken to a number of social workers recently.

Yeah, I can imagine.

That is amazing. Okay, so we talked about how you got into tech, and you mentioned that geography was one of your favorite subjects when you were younger. But could you think back, and can you describe what your earliest tech memory is?

Yes. So I'm really sure my age here, I'm 38. So when I was in school, we had died up Internet and windows, like, 98. This was so ancient, and I didn't have a computer at the time, never used Internet. My best friend Joe, he got set up all that stuff, and he was like, yeah, you should come down to my house after school, and I'll show you how to work all this. And we brought me down. This was back in the day of these messenger apps. Really ancient MSM, social media. Yeah, that was it. That was exactly the one back in those days. And I just got completely hooked. So every day, I was down in his house after school on the Internet. And as you probably remember, on dial up modems, you couldn't use your phone line and the Internet at the same time. So his mom was so cross at me every day because she could never get on her phone to talk to anybody.

Okay, so we've talked about your incredibly diverse globetrotting career, and then you came out to Belfast and you did your conversion degree. So how did you get from there into ASOS?

So when ASOs were just starting up the tech hub, they used, like, a local sort of recruitment firm because we didn't have our own in house at the time. And so I got contacted by one of the recruiters who was working for ASOS, and they were telling me about this new opportunity, about the tech hub. And so we just had a conversation about it. And then I got introduced to one of the principal architects here, Marco. And that was, like, the first stage of this conversation. And then the second stage, I had to build a sample app for the team to have a look at. And then I remember when I got to the final stage, which was, like, you had to do, like, a walkthrough and a demo of the app that you made. I remember I was so nervous, and I said to the recruiter, Maria, I was like, can you give me a bit of a heads up on what to expect here from this? And Maria was like, I can't because you're the only one who's actually made it to this stage before. And part of that was very flattering but really daunting at the same time because I was like, oh, God. And she's like, yeah, we've been recruiting for quite a while and we haven't been able to get anybody, but you'll be fine. But, yeah, obviously it was fine. It was great. I had a really great interview with our senior, who's now lead Ed, who was so lovely and made me feel really at ease because I was so nervous I could hardly speak. But, yeah, obviously I got the job and I was actually the first mobile engineer that they hired in Northern Ireland. So I was very proud. And I remember when the recruiter told me, she phoned me and I was in the park, I was actually shaken because it was such a big deal to come from a social worker and to now getting into a big tech company and it was a really big deal to me and it meant a lot.

And I'm so pleased that the interview was nice. Like, they made you feel relaxed because, yeah, interviews are really nervous and as someone that has done lots of interviewing at ASOS, I think it's so important to make the person being interviewed as relaxed as possible so you can just show your best self. Incredible. Okay, so we've gone through your background, but this episode is called A Day in a Life of. So could you talk us through a typical day in your role?

Yeah. So usually how it works is we would come in and every morning we do a stand up and we would talk through all of our different projects that we have going on the board. Just anything that needs to be done that week. There's always new features about different carousels. So we're always kind of managing the pipeline of work. Usually after stand up, if you're working with somebody, you would have a call with them and you would go through the work for the day. You're always interacting with different colleagues, product owners. It's always quite a busy day and there's always a lot going on, but no two days are never really ever the same either. And that's kind of why I really enjoy it, because you're never doing the same thing every day.

Amazing. Do you get to work across teams often?

The way it usually tends to work is the web team would usually do their bit and they would set up the APIs for us. To consume, we would obviously be working in parallel and we would do as much as we can on our side and then we try to sort of bring it together and integrate it together at the end. So, yeah, it would be quite often that we will work with Web to do the work that we do.

That's fun. I know whenever my teams have worked with other people, it just seems so much more enjoyable because it's nice to work with different people. I know lots of people love the ASOs discount, and that is definitely a perk for working at ASOS. But what would you say is the best part about working in tech at AsoS?

For me, one of the things I noticed right away on day one was the leadership team. So particularly not just in the Northern Ireland office, because most of my team is in London. So I kind of work between two worlds almost, but I noticed that on both sides, I think we've all probably had jobs in the past where we've had managers, and a manager's role traditionally is a bit more assigning you tasks and sort of managing you. But in ASOs, it's not like that. The management and leadership team are here to help and support you. If there's anything you need, if there's a goal you want to accomplish, they're there kind of cheering you on and they'll do anything they can to help you achieve that goal. There's a completely different shift in the power dynamic. You're like a full member of the team and you can do whatever it is you want to do. They will facilitate that and try to help you to get there. And that just struck me right away when I joined ASOs, and it creates such a good dynamic in the office.

Amazing. As an engineering manager, it is wonderful to hear that that is such an important part, like bigging up my colleagues. Yeah, that's so good. If I can link onto that, what would you say has been your proudest moment or the biggest thing that you are proud of during your time at ASOS?

I mean, I've got to take part in quite a lot of different things since I've been here in the past year. I got to go to Droidcon in London and also in Berlin. Our lead Android engineer Ed and our principal Savas were giving talks in Berlin at the Joy Con event. Joy Con, for anyone who doesn't know, is like a big Android related event where you have all of the biggest and best engineers from all the big tech companies, including Google, and they all give presentations and it's just everything to do with Android. So obviously we have colleagues who go there and represent us and give talks. So the people that give talks get a free ticket. So Savas gave me his ticket, And I got to go over with them to Berlin and spend the week over there. And just being a part of that community, meeting all of those amazing engineers and getting to support Ed and savvy over there, that was definitely a big highlight. I think maybe just more during my day to day jobs, I'm quite lucky in that I genuinely love what I do. I feel like I get paid to do my hobby, and I know all my colleagues, they kind of see that because it sort of shines through. And so I always have an attitude of where I try to leave things better than what I find them. And that's kind of the attitude I've taken that my work in the year that I've been here, it's like I always try, no matter what it is I work on, I always try to leave the app and whatever I've done a lot better than what it was before I got to. And I know it's probably not like a standout achievement. It's more of a day to day thing, but it's something that I'm really proud of.

No, that's amazing. And it's such a good attitude to have as well. And I love the fact that you are doing your hobby that is so brilliant that you can just do your hobby and be paid for it and work for a wonderful organization and team.

I feel so lucky to be able to do it. I really do.

I have to ask you, what do you do on tech develops then? If your day to day is your hobby, do you have any side projects you're working on, or what do you like to learn on? Tech develops?

So in Android development, it moves so fast, like every other day, there's something new. So using tech develops, I'm trying to keep on top of the latest greatest. So at the moment, we have Jetpack Compose, which is like a whole new framework of writing UI in apps. And the app that I built as part of the interview process here, I've actually kept that on as a side project. And so anytime anything new comes out, I will try and integrate it into that app and kind of use it as a playground to explore and kind of weigh up the pros and cons of it and think, can I scale this and add this into the ASOS app? How will that benefit us? Are there any cons in trying to scale it up to that size? So that's usually how I keep on top of things, which is really fun. And I noticed that a lot of the colleagues in our team now reference that app.

That's amazing, because when there's new stuff.

Coming out, I always try to get it into that app. And it's good for people to see a working prototype of how it works, because it's one thing reading documentation, but it's another to actually see how it works in a real working app.

Why is this app? I'm so intrigued.

It's actually quite like a small app that we just do for the interviews. It's called SpaceX. So it uses Elon Musk's SpaceX API to get a list of all of his rocket launches. But the app itself is quite simple. It just displays like a list of all of the rocket launches and information about the rockets, but it's more of the underlying tech pars. It is where it kind of shines. So it wouldn't be an app that you would release to the public, it's more just for the technical stuff under the bonnet.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. That's awesome though, that you're able to continue to use something from the interview to improve day to day. Let's think about slightly broader than just ASOs and the tech in ASOs. If you could make one change within the tech industry, what would that change be?

I think tech companies have quite a large responsibility nowadays, especially, I'm thinking more towards maybe like social media type tech companies with managing people's data privacy. We have the rise of AI, and I think there's quite a lot of power and responsibility that comes with tech. And I think it's something that's going to affect all tech industries going forward, giving people power over their own information. And I think that's something that tech needs to really get a hold of, especially to protect people from scams, protect people from fake news and fake information. It's quite a big challenge. I'm not quite sure what the solution is to that, but, yeah, I definitely feel like. I think something needs to change there in terms of the big tech companies taking more responsibility over that. And it's good to see that at ASOs, we're doing that currently.

That is amazing. It's nice that, as you say, we're already taking action on it and trying to make a difference. So if we focus back on you, obviously we've learnt about your past, we've learnt about what you're doing day to day and how you are progressing. Where do you see your career going in the future, I think I would.

Love to move into more of a senior or lead role. It does take quite a while to get there. It is definitely a journey to get to that level. I've always kind of loved the idea of doing like shadowing a lead engineer for a couple of days or a week or something just to sort of see what their job is actually like. Because I think the lead engineer's job is quite different from a day to day developer job.

Amazing. It's been so interesting hearing about you and your journey to tech and what you're doing now and where you want to go in the future. Do you have any tips, tricks, advice for anyone that is interested in getting into tech?

I think probably one of the biggest hurdles that you need to overcome is really just your own fear because it's not easy to make such a big change and move into a different career direction. I remember when I was making that change, I was leaving a full time career to essentially become unemployed and go back to being a student at 33. And I remember all of the doubts I had in my head. I was like, what if this doesn't work out? What if I'm not smart enough? What if I just don't pass the course? And I think it's very easy to become paralyzed if you sort of think like that. So I think probably my best advice is to just, if you genuinely have an interest in it, just go for it, get started and your confidence will catch up.

That is amazing advice and I do feel like that would really demonstrate the D in our ABCDs of being brave, because that sounds incredibly brave thing to do to just switch careers definitely seems to have been the right decision. And you seem to be thriving in ASOS. That's everything that we've got for today. Thank you so much for being so open and honest and authentic and sharing so many wonderful stories with us.

Thank you for having me.

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