About Grofers
Grofers is India’s largest low price online supermarket in the grocery space. The company uses its in-house technology platform to manage a network of over 5,000 partner stores that enable the company to run a fast and lean supply chain – from manufacturers straight to customers. Grofers utilizes its efficient supply chain to deliver over 25 million products to customers every month. The engineering teams of Grofers are in Gurugram and Bangalore, with the Gurugram team handling the user journey up to the point of cart checkouts and payments on the app and the Bangalore team handling the journey of orders after the checkouts till it reaches the customers' doorstep.
When I started my software engineering internship, my focus was to learn as much as I could with the time I had. I was a part of the backend chapter in the technology team and was assigned to work with the Last Mile Technology Team. To brief about the Last Mile Technology Team, this is the team that manages the flow of order from the warehouse to the customers after the order is placed. The team had backend engineers, frontend engineers, android engineers, testers and quality assurance engineers along with a product manager working very closely with each other to come up with amazing systems and solutions. I was assigned a buddy/mentor on my first day, Aditya Chauhan who was like a friend to me and with whom I could easily communicate with. I spent the first week interacting with people from all aspects of the Operations Technology org, including engineers familiar with the backend system, engineers familiar with the frontend system, product managers, and analysts. Interacting with these people gave me a real understanding of how the team works together. This gave me a ton of insight into the org and its systems, helping me to get on-board quickly.
My Learning Experience
Usually, the companies like to give the interns an individual project to work on and complete by the end of the term. In my case, this was as far from the case as possible. I started with a bootcamp demo project, Scrumboard that helped me get onboard with the tools and frameworks required for this internship. Continuous support from my mentors and hard work helped me to get onboard quickly. After around 2-weeks, I was directly put into the sprint planning, and was expected to complete real, committed tasks along with the team. So, when people ask about my internship experience at Grofers, I tell them that I pretty much forgot that I was an intern. I worked directly with other engineers from both my team and others to clarify/get clarifications on projects, worked with product managers to scope out future project requirements, and even worked with analysts to follow up on shipped projects to track the impact. I feel like I did some real work that is important to the success of the team and the company. It was amazing to get my first PR accepted and see my code on production. To be more specific, I worked mostly with JAVA, Spring Boot, Firebase, MySQL, etc. Along with writing code, I also learned the tools and technologies that every developer should know about such as debuggers, git, jenkins, rabbit mq, jenkins, and a lot more. Moreover, I got an opportunity to visit warehouse and distribution points and see how the orders are actually delivered from our mobile-phone to home. To get in-depth understanding of my work as an intern, feel free to check into my Internship Presentation slides here.
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| The orange is a big part of the company culture and the company office. |
The Work and Social Culture
Work culture of Grofers is something that I would love to talk about all day. It is rare to find such companies that builds strong bond between employees and provides positive, productive work environment. The amazing people here never made me feel like just an intern. It was awesome to be a part of discussions during the sprint planning and grooming sessions which were going to affect thousands of actual users. Being a part of healthy discussions during Sprint planning and expressing my tasks during stand-ups gave me a sense of importance and belonging that I never thought of. Another thing that I liked about the company was the interactions among the people. Everyone is so interactive and supportive that you could never differentiate between juniors and seniors. The work culture is so good here that I loved spending more time in the office rather than my PG. Apart from work, there were multiple interesting events every week which, as an intern, I definitely took advantage of. Ranging from birthday celebrations and team-building activities such as team lunches and offsite parties to weekend outings such as Yellagiri visit, I never enjoyed any place more than this. This place gave me a hell lot of memories to cherish forever. To sum up, the culture of this organization is very welcoming and amiable that it was really hard to say goodbye.
Before and After the Internship Changes
Talking about the changes that I can feel within myself currently, I never expected this level of improvement in myself. Before coming to Grofers, I was not at all confident about my skills and knowledge but today, I can see myself as an amazing software engineer in the next few years. As a person, I feel the internship helped me change a lot of things. One of the most important skills I have learned is time management. At times, balancing many different long-term and rapidly shifting projects simultaneously taught me how to make progress over time and stick to deadlines. After the internship, my attitude towards self-management skills has changed for the better. It’s easy to get wrapped up into the details of day-to-day tasks and projects, but I’ve also realized the value of immersing myself in the workplace culture. Also, this internship served as a stepping stone to my real-life job as I can see myself prepared for future opportunities. Lastly, I learned that co-workers are much more than just the people we work with. They are like a family who collaborates to do something great.
Conclusion
Working at Grofers has been a phenomenal experience - magnificent with numerous opportunities for personal growth as an engineer, as well as an individual. I couldn't be happier to have had my first on-site work experience in Grofers.
A special thanks to the amazing team and the mentors that I had. They were constantly supporting me during this journey and taught me a lot of things that are going to help me throughout my life. To conclude, it was a great learning experience for me because after going to Grofers, I realized that this is something I could see myself doing as a career.
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