4*9+1/2 Work Schedule
Is a 3-day weekend the key to a balanced life? During the pandemic, we got to experience working remotely. Luckily, in our type of work, it was pretty easy to adjust. However, after some time, it was becoming difficult to disconnect and the lines between work and personal life started to blur. So, how do we make sure everyone gets a healthy balance and keeps her/his skills on the cutting edge of tech? At IdeaHub we decided to implement a 4-day 9-hour work schedule followed by 4 hours of self-improvement time Friday dedicated to learning and trying new tech.The idea was to offer flexibility and to give everyone enough time to rest and have some fun during the extended weekend. The employees still have access to the same benefits and receive the same salary as if they had a traditional schedule because they work the same number of hours. Our colleagues have already experienced this work program for about 3 months and the consensus is WE LIKE IT. The key benefits – Productivity: coming into work fully recharged makes a big difference and keeps away the Monday blues – Employee retention and improved recruitment: people are looking for flexibility, so offering an extra day off makes a difference – Mental health: employees are happier and less stressed. Free Fridays allow employees to take care of their personal tasks – we all know that running around town with errands and trying to get back to your next meeting is a hectic mess and bad use of PTO – Stronger team: the program could not succeed without shared accountability and ownership. We clarified how we communicate and make sure issues do not go unsolved and made a clear plan on how to support each other Challenges Of course, there are some challenges, but none were a deal-breaker:– inequality between workers: this program may not work for all employees. Adopting the new work schedule was optional and it depended on the individual to truly understand whether it fits them – downtime and availability: Yes, sometimes there is work on Friday – but exceptions have solutions. For some projects, it was as easy as a round-robin assignment of support and for others building a tiered leveled support If a compressed work week doesn’t turn out to be your dream schedule, give yourself permission to return to a standard work week. But if you can, make sure to try it out, and don’t be afraid to experiment.
Hacktm 2022
Uncorporated – we lead (well… code) from the frontAt IdeaHub everybody is a developer from the project manager to the owners. And we do it because we like to code. Same for our good friend Adrian, who is a founder of another startup in Timisoara. Our Project This weekend Silvia and me, the co-owners of Ideahub participated at #hacktm2022 and we want to thank the organizers Banat IT for doing an excellent job, as always. We had a great time at the event and we are grateful for all the work they did during the years. As for our project, we were a team of three people and our project called ChargeE is meant to simplify the micropayments solutions for car-centric services, especially for electric vehicle charging stations by allowing people to pay with their cars alone. Since initiating and paying for a charging station takes an average of 5 minutes to do while a charging session is about 50 minutes, we estimate our solution is able to increase the availability of charging infrastructure for electric cars by about ten percent. The payByCarFace system that we propose requires no additional equipment in the car as we developed Machine Learning algorithms in Python that recognize license plate, color, and the overall shape of the car. To increase the security of the solution, our algorithm continuously checks for anomalies after the charge/paynment is initiated and will stop the process if we identify fraud. Applications We coded three separate applications1. A mobile application in ReactNative that serves as the electronic wallet and information center for the entire system. The important thing was to make sure the phone is not necessary to initiate payments, so other persons (employees, parents) can use it seamlessly. 2. The backend was built in Java Spring / React and hosted on a bare metal server we owned. We actually created the entire thing in JHipster www.jhipster.tech with a UML (in this case JDL) first approach. 3. A python application that does the machine vision and is meant to be used both on a RaspberryPy 4 and the AWS Lambda via Docker for continuous checks. In just 60 hours our team of three people ended up with:– 500 lines of Python code– 10.000 lines of Java (out of which we have written about 1000 ourselves)– 6500 lines of Typescript (about 700 written by us)————–Bottom line, between the three of us we wrote 2200 lines of code in three very different languages, and all the three applications functioned well via RestAPI in three separate environments(Mobile, Ubuntu and Raspberry). Did I mention we also put CI on it because… DevOps dreams are made with this. Events such as these give us the opportunity to test new technologies before we ask our colleagues to work with them, we certainly hope your current manager is also in love with coding… or perhaps you want to try and join a full developer team for a change because we are always searching for new colleagues.