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Employee Spotlight: Building Products to Assist the Learner Journey

Q&A with Pieter Van der Haegen, Software Engineer at DataCamp
Aug 2020  · 4 min read

What was your journey to joining DataCamp?

I studied applied computer science in Leuven, Belgium and to complete my undergraduate degree, I was required to complete an internship. I found out about DataCamp when they sponsored an app I worked on for students to plan their class schedules, Quivr, and was subsequently hired at DataCamp as an intern. During my mid-internship evaluation, I was asked if I wanted to join the company full-time, so I went on a few rounds of interviews and got a job offer!

Describe your current team. What do you find most interesting about your role?

Currently I work on the Engineering team as a member of the Learner Journey Squad. Our squad is responsible for guiding users from one piece of learning content to the next. Most visibly, we manage the dashboard of our learner (which is the first page you see after logging into DataCamp). I love that I can constantly learn new technologies while improving our product for our users. Also, as engineers, we work closely together with the Product team to work out new features and conduct user interviews to understand what our users need.

How has your career grown since joining DataCamp?

I started as a developer with not a lot of experience or knowledge. While working here, I’ve gotten opportunities to be responsible for bigger projects—integrating a new email system, transferring payment data from our old system to our new system, and much more. I’m very interested in managing people as an Engineering Lead—I’ve been taking on more responsibilities so I hope I can keep growing my career in that direction.

What are you most excited for at DataCamp?

We’ve been building a lot of awesome products, like Signal and Projects. The next step is to take those standalone pieces and put them all together. This will streamline the journey for our learners and ensure they can learn what they need and apply that knowledge!

What do you like best about working for DataCamp?

I love how my colleagues are always ready to help each other when needed and share knowledge. I also love the flexibility to schedule my work hours to fit my personal schedule.

What are your favorite DataCamp cultural values and why?

For me, it's a tie between ownership and being data-driven. Having ownership over the things I work on is rewarding and I’ve learned a lot from it. Collaborating with my colleagues is easy since everyone has clear ownership over different areas of the business.

Our culture of making data-driven decisions means that we’re not following gut feelings but actually looking at the data we have (or gathering new data). So we’re able to quantitatively determine what our users want the most and prioritize accordingly.

What do you do when you’re not at work?

I like to have a busy schedule and meet up with friends. Twice a month, I’m a bartender at a concert venue, Het Depot, just five minutes from DataCamp’s office in Leuven. Over the years, I’ve taken quite a few colleagues with me to different concerts. Another awesome reason to come and work for DataCamp 😉

Anything else you’d like to share with our learners?

Keep giving us feedback! We may not always answer directly or solve things right away, but your feedback is very valuable to us and helps us build a better product!

Would you like to join Pieter at DataCamp? We’re currently hiring in New York; London; Leuven, Belgium; and remote locations. Check out our open roles.

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