A Day in the Life of a Senior Software Engineer at Sysco LABS
John Stotz is a Senior Software Engineer at Sysco LABS. It’s his job to write the code behind Sysco Shop, Sysco’s ecommerce platform.
Sysco Shop allows Sysco customers to place orders for restaurant supplies—anything from fresh produce to commercial cleaning supplies—through an iOS, Android, or web app. Sysco Shop offers restaurant customers the same sort of fast, easy experience a consumer might have ordering their groceries online. That’s a hard job at the scale of a Fortune 60 company: Sysco’s customers bring in $51 billion in total annual sales. Those customers could be as small as a neighborhood pizza shop, or as large as a multi-national corporation.
Here’s what John’s day typical day looks like as a member of the Sysco LABS engineering team.
8:00 am to 11:00 am
Catch up
“I grab my morning cup of coffee and breakfast while reading through emails and Slack messages. We work closely with our teams in Sri Lanka, so a lot of communication happens overnight. During this time I like to get a rough draft planned of what my day will look like. I start by going through our team’s backlog of tickets and listing out at least three things I want to accomplish that day.”
11:00 am to 12:00 pm
Team meetings
”At 11:00 am, I grab a quick snack because it’s time for the team standup. I hop on a call with our team (we focus on the search experience within Shop) and spend a few minutes catching up with what everyone else did and is hoping to do that day. This feels like it has become so much more important with everyone working remotely.”
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Take a screen break
“I have lunch and take a quick walk. These lunch time walks really help get the problem-solving juices flowing and let me step away from the screen for a bit.”
1:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Deep focus
”This is what I’d call crunch time for me. It’s when everything suddenly becomes very productive and things start coming together. Depending on the day this will either mean long coding sessions or planning meetings with product managers and other stakeholders to get requirements going.”
After 5:00 pm
Enjoy Austin, Texas
”If the weather is nice, I like to get out for a quick bike ride around the river or go paddle boarding. Probably the best part about living in Austin is that the weather is always warm enough to get outside and do something active!”