Technology jobs

Teresa:

I’ve always actually found insurance to be very interesting. Maybe at a party it doesn’t sound thrilling to somebody from the outside, but while I’ve always been a coder, just data analysis in general is very interesting to me so I think insurance is an interesting industry.

Anup:

As an IT manager, I don’t do anymore hands on coding, but my job becomes important because it’s how I’m coaching and empowering my individual contributors so that they can successfully deliver our projects.

Teresa:

So the job structure has five different levels. Developing was my passion and so when I came in, I was able to start at the lead level of that family, but we’ve hired people with just a couple of years of experience, fresh out of college even. A pretty wide variety.

Anup:

You get the opportunities to work on different initiatives, someone who is more interested in the coding side of the aspect of the job, right? They can do their hands on coding. Someone who is more interested in designing the applications, they can work on the architectural path of their career. Or if someone is interested in mobile coding, we have a whole different organization set up for mobile native applications.

Teresa:

We’re able to release either new systems or changes to existing systems, that’s one of the key differentiators in how well we’re able to price our product.

Anup:

We make sure that we are successful together. Everyone is ready to coach and mentor others. We also have our training center for IT university, where they provide all the trainings at a level for the latest technologies. When technologies were changing a few years back, our applications were in the pipeline to be rewritten in those new languages. So that gives me the confidence that our leaders are looking for what’s coming in the next three years, five years.

Teresa:

Technology has changed so much in the 22 years I’ve been doing this. It’s almost completely different. It’s not easy, it’s not like I come in and I know exactly what I need to do for the day, but that’s really what I love is digging into a problem and then figuring out a technical solution for it.

Anup:

There are a lot of opportunities. As long as you are willing to learn and take risks, you can grow and learn a lot within Progressive IT.

Domonic:

So, we kind of have this unofficial slogan for the systems test engineer, "We write code to break code" We write this software, this automation because to manually go out to our quoting applications, it would take forever. We need a wide net of test combinations and automation to figure out what's going on with our systems. So, I think the main objective of my role as the systems test engineer is making sure that our rates are accurate, and you know, we have a good customer experience with our applications. If a customer's maybe buying a new vehicle and they're quoting and then all of a sudden you enter in a value and then the application crashes. We are really trying to prevent those types of bugs because those are the ones that really impact the customers.

Domonic:

You know, my day to day varies day to-- I mean, it literally varies day to day. I can, in one day, be a software developer developing automation. And then on another day, I can be a quality assurance analyst as a bug hunter. So, I really think the versatility of the role is what makes it unique. We have to speak the developer lingo because we're talking with the developers, but at the same point in time, we also are writing automation for our quality assurance analysts to run. And so, we kind of have to have softer skills as well that's not all the technical jargon that we might be speaking with the developers.

Domonic:

One of the things that really surprised me about Progressive is how open they are to new ideas. I'm able to come up with an idea and then Progressive helps me implement it. The culture is very laid back. You know, even though we're a bigger company, it definitely doesn't feel like we are. They're great about letting me build up my skills. And I took a bunch of courses that Progressive offered to the IT University learning web APIs and all sorts of other awesome technologies.

Domonic:

There's no real end to our quest. You know, as technology changes, as Progressive changes, our automation is always changing. We're always doing something new and exciting. I love designing software, developing software, and I equally love hunting for bugs and I think the system test engineer is the perfect mix for me.

Tony:

To me, learning a new programming language is not much at all about learning the syntax of that language.

Tony:

It's about learning the libraries that are available in that language.

Tony:

It's more about the organization than what I'm typing.

Tony:

I've been kind of a phone geek, I guess for about as long as they've existed.

Tony:

As long as cell phones have been around I've found ways to work around the limitations that are put on them to make them more useful to me.

Tony:

I joined IT in 2005, the IT Grant was introduced maybe a year or two prior.

Tony:

I decided to pursue my Master's Degree with the IT Grant because it was just a great opportunity offered by Progressive.

Tony:

It was during that time that I started getting those opportunities to work on more interesting applications in our department.

Tony:

Our mobile area is definitely using some of the latest techniques in mobile development like Functional Reactive Programming.

Tony:

All our developers code for both Android and for IOS.

Tony:

The company culture overall is really friendly.

Tony:

When you have the right sort of people that are able to adapt and learn new things and not simply follow a checklist then it really comes down to having the support to do it and absolutely we have the support to get the things that we need to do things and to do them right.

Tony:

The work/life balance at Progressive is really good.

Tony:

For the most part, work is able to stay at work and when I go home, work doesn't become my life, which is something that is really a big thing for me.

Tony:

It's cool to know that I work on something that many people interact with and that people understand, right?

Tony:

Some of the work I've done I couldn't explain to somebody and say what I do.

Tony:

You know, it's fun to tell people that I work on Progressive's mobile apps for Android and iPhone.