Thank you for stopping by our very first DISQO Developer blog post. Here, we’ll be featuring content by various DISQOTECH (our Product, Engineering, and Data org) team members. This blog will include posts by our technical writers, engineers, product managers, data scientists and more. Follow us on our day-to-day experiences working at DISQO, and get into our head space. You’ll be seeing tutorials, discussions, and employee highlights.
But before we get into all that, let’s learn a little about our daily life here at DISQO.
Our Company
First with our name - you might think that we spent a lot of time doing market analysis and user group testing to come up with the most effective name. Nope! Frankly, we’re named DISQO because our founders wanted a short and fun name that captured the essence of the company. We’re serious about results, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously.
The Q in DISQO is important. We’re known in our industry to delivery very high-quality consumer opinion and behavior data and the Q in DISQO stands for Quality. That’s something we pride ourselves on. Q also references asking questions. It’s a constant reminder for us to stay curious and ask why?
Our tech team is called DISQOTECH (because why not!); and is divided between our headquarters in Glendale, CA and our international office in Yerevan, Armenia. We also have remote workers in other parts of the US and Mexico. DISQOTECH in Glendale shares a large room on the 21st floor of the city’s largest building. You can catch a glimpse of beautiful city and mountains views from any room.
We have an open office environment, which makes it easy for us all to communicate. There’s a disco ball hanging from the center of the room, screens spanning a wall that tell us how our apps are performing, a hammock, and a tiny cacti forest. Some desks have minimal setups and others are crowded with figurines and humongous TV-watching-worthy monitors.
On a typical day, everyone has a different routine. Some of us drop off our DISQO backpacks (holiday party presents) and b-line it to the coffee machine. Others grab breakfast and go into super concentration mode once we put on our headphones. Then there are a few of us who like to chat a bit in the morning and see how our colleagues are doing.
Our Engineering Teams
We have several engineering teams all working on different projects, and we’ve named each of them after disco themes like Funkadelic, Inferno, and Purple Electric Penguins. We have fun names, but are lean and mean when it comes to our duties. Most of our teams operate using Scrum, but we have one team using Kanban. Each team decides what works best for them.
Aside from our engineering teams, we also house others under the tech-side of DISQO. These teams are the Data Analysts and Technical Writers. You’ll be hearing from them too.
How We Spend Time Together
We have lunch catered on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so we end up spending a lot of time together. And some of us venture to our favorite local coffee shop for an after-lunch jolt of energy.
When it’s nearing the end of the day and people are feeling up to it, some of us head into the training conference room to play Super Smash Bros while others practice their skills at the ping pong table in the east wing. More recently, some of us have started going to the HIIT class that’s hosted in the building on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Now you know a little more about our day-to-day. Next, we’ll be publishing more in-depth posts about what’s going on inside our minds. Through this blog, you’ll see how we think, what technologies we’re interested in, and how we’re driving the consumer insights industry forward.