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Archives for September 2017

Being Young and Being Part of the Construction Industry

Blog, Development, Interns Posted: September 22, 2017

Few kids say they want to work in the construction industry when they grow up. It’s perceived as an industry that only employs blue-collar workers who spend hours out in the scorching sun.

While in reality, the construction industry encompasses many jobs and career fields that suit all sorts of people, the stigma still clouds the industry and keeps the younger generation from envisioning a career in it. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I’d find myself working alongside this industry, but here I am. These are my thoughts on construction.

Separating HCSS from the construction industry, you’ll find a high-tech software company that creates products to help make construction professionals’ lives easier. The company provides great customer support, and our tech support analysts know everything they need to know about our products to provide quality service. In fact, walking through the tech support wing, you’ll see a relaxed team that enjoys what they are doing.

Before I worked at HCSS, I imagined tech support as a call center with phones ringing non-stop and people rushing to get each call over with to move to the next one. But that’s not the way it is at HCSS. Our tech support representatives take their time with every customer to make sure their questions or issues are resolved.

Because I work with the product managers, I get a glimpse of all the different departments of the company. Seeing all the cogs working together and chugging along makes me proud to be working at HCSS.

HCSS is deeply embedded in construction. We introduce newer technology to an industry that is perceived to lack the innovation needed to thrive. The industry may be on an innovative track, but the lack of information about the industry is a reason why there aren’t a lot of kids who dream of working in it.

As an intern at a company whose customers are in construction, I find myself questioning why there is no information given to the younger generations about the opportunities in this industry. They are told about engineering and architecture, but people separate construction from those other career options. I even find myself separating what I do at HCSS, which is programming, from construction. To be fair, software development and construction don’t sound like they go hand-in-hand. And when friends and family ask me where I work, I tell them I work at a software company, but I don’t really elaborate on the industry I serve. I do tell them about the slide and the Segways and the other fun perks of working here, which paint HCSS as the best company to work for. But calling HCSS a construction company unfortunately doesn’t paint an exciting picture.

However, there is a push to get information about construction out to younger generations. HCSS President and CEO Mike Rydin created I Build America [www.ibuildamerica.com], a movement designed to bring awareness and pride to the men and women who work in the construction industry and highlight the opportunities available for the next generation. It is a great way to mobilize young people to start thinking about a career in construction. The perception of construction jobs is that all you need is a high school diploma, but there are many jobs available for those with a higher education. Again, it goes back to the overall public perception that construction is just manual labor in the sun, but a construction company still needs all the office jobs that other types of companies need.

I Build America is a noble movement to bring respect and appreciation to an industry that does not receive enough credit, and it makes me proud to be working for the company driving it. Whenever I’m on the road, instead of seeing construction as a nuisance, I have learned to appreciate all of the work involved in building America, both literally and figuratively.

Putting My Education to Practice as a QA Intern

Blog, Development Posted: September 8, 2017

My internship experience this summer as a Quality Assurance intern in the Research and Development department has been very engaging and has provided me with many opportunities. The R&D team was created to design new products that encompass the vision that so many employees at HCSS have for the construction industry. An idea can only be visualized to a certain extent before it takes a team to come together and make it come to life.

I came into this summer internship with only one college semester left before I graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Information Systems. The QA role seemed to be a great fit to reflect all the things I had learned in classes up to this point, and it provided me with an opportunity to implement and further expand that knowledge. In my college classes, I learned about a lot of the daily workflows and terms used around the workplace, but I had never had the chance to apply them to real-life scenarios.

Most of my daily work consisted of finding bugs in new releases and posting them to a scrum board for our developers to pick up and fix. Afterwards, I would grab the bugs they had worked on and verify that they functioned properly. This process would run in roughly two-week cycles called sprints, and, at the end, we would call a meeting to analyze the positives and negatives that happened and ways we could improve for the next sprint. This was the routine Agile development system the team had been going through for months before I joined them.

One unique learning experience I got was visiting a load site where dump trucks were getting loaded up with dirt by an excavator to create a retention pond. The HCSS Trucking application that I’ve been testing all summer is optimized to make the ticket writer’s job extremely simple and eliminate the use of the paper ticket system that the trucking industry has always used. Out at the site, we would go to meet up with the ticket writer who is using the app. We would gather bug info and ask for input on improving our app based on their usage in the field. Getting to see their jobs and bring those thought processes back to the office allowed me to create better use-case scenarios for testing. This also allowed me to offer feature suggestions that will help optimize the user experience.

When I reflect on the experience I had with this internship, one thing that sticks out is the relationships I’ve built with so many people at this company. It has been great to see how much a team can get accomplished through clear communication and the common drive each member has to innovate an industry in so many new ways.

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Janmy - HCSS

I love that HCSS encourages continuous learning, which helps me not only be a better UXer but also a 'jill-of-all-trades.' Additionally, if I see a need to improve our processes or products, I'm encouraged to explore solutions to proactively achieve that."

Janmy S.
UX Designer

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