This document is modelled after Robin Malhotra's Questions to ask your iOS interviewer. It aims to provide a few answers to how we work at Babylon and our process is structured.
We use GitHub. We have a central repo that hosts the main and white label apps, and a few Open Source projects that we created and rely on.
We currently run on CircleCI
We have the main app and a few white-label apps.
We use a modular architecture, so our app workspace is split into 9 Xcode projects for modules and apps, 3 projects for test utilities and shared features, and 4 projects related to our SDK, not counting the Pods project (and our OSS projects)
Each module project has 2 targets on average: one for the framework, one for the tests (Unit, UI, Snapshot). The app project has 2 targets (6*2) given our white-labelling variants.
It's around 250 lines of code at the moment, with about 15-20 lanes for beta testing, daily and custom builds, etc. This file however includes multiple other files, especially in fastlane/Lanes and fastlane/Actions too, making the code dedicated to fastlane quite bigger.
Yes.
Slack, as a non-trivial part of the team is remote. Zoom for meetings of more than 2-3 people.
No.
It's very rare, honestly. Most people that work late do so on their own accord. The office is pretty empty after 6pm.
It depends on the squad you’re assigned to. For Enrolment and Integrity I counted 18 in a typical sprint, so that averages to ~2 a day. Note that quite a few of them are optional. Not all of the meetings, though, are the "let's discuss x" type of meetings. For example, we hold a PR party weekly where we, in groups, try to speed up the review process.
Interviews, sometimes, can take up some time. It's usually, at maximum, one hour per week. Reviewing tests is also part of your day-to-day duties. Every engineer, including juniors, is involved in this (both interviewing and reviewing tests).
Does your calendar look like a losing game of tetris? Do you have large continuous uninterrupted hours?
It depends a lot on the squad. For Enrolment and Integrity, for example, most meetings are on the first Monday and Tuesday of the sprint. For Triage and Health Management this is not the case and are more spread out.
There are very few at the moment.
West: there is a commercial gym close by, a park, and a barebones gym in the office. There’s also free yoga twice a week and a weekly 5-a-side football game. East: commercial gym close by.
Yes, we have anonymous company level Q&A and peakon surveys. [this is my experience].
Are any of your engineering managers mobile engineers? Do mobile devs feel like they have to learn backend dev to "prove themselves" / feel like they have a seat at the table?
iOS engineers have to know iOS and general programming practices, and that’s it.
As we work in squads, collaboration with designers, product, and QA is very tight and happens every day. After a ticket has been discussed in discovery and planning, designs (made in Sketch) are imported to a common (per-platform) Zeplin project.
Not usually, but developers are encouraged to report wrong alignments, spacing, and in general to participate in the design/UX discussion.
There is a drive for consistency with a design system, but platform-specific conventions are taken into account.
Example of the above: Do you have the “title” of a VC on the left in iOS/on the center in Android for consistency? Do you have a modal View Controller presented with a back arrow on the left?
We follow iOS standards, but it's up to every squad.
Same answer as with designers. Collaboration is frequent as there is a QA per squad. A build is triggered from the main branch every night (with custom builds trigger-able at any time), and in the morning the QA starts testing against it.
We have a set training budget that can be used at the person's discretion.
We have a set training budget that can be used at the person's discretion.
There is usually a product person in each squad that leads this, but everyone is encouraged to contribute and/or raise concerns.
Yes. We wouldn't be here otherwise.