#Life@Hubble: From Big-Name Companies to Hyper-Growth Tech Startups – How Hubble Attracts Top Talents

From humble strides to a leading construction technology company in 5 short years, Hubble has been growing from strength to strength with every passing moment. It’s of little surprise that Hubble manages to attract the best talents from all around who believe in our vision of building better cities of tomorrow and to join us in our mission to unify construction on a single digital construction platform.

Joining us here today in our Hubble Newsroom, we have our very own Julius Uy (Vice President of Software Engineering) and Liu Wei Yuan (Staff Software Engineer) to share with us about their experience with Hubble.

What Made You Decide to Join Hubble?

Julius: About a year ago, Shijing (CEO of Hubble) approached me and introduced me to the Hubble suite of products and vision, and as he laid them out, I recognised the potential that the company had and was immediately excited over the amount of growth that I could foresee happening if we were to work together.

I believe that a perfect company doesn’t exist, but if its fundamentals are strong enough, then I believe that we will be able to carry it to success – and Hubble’s foundation is rock-solid.

Weiyuan: My story is pretty similar to what Julius has mentioned. Upon joining, I could also see the potential of what Hubble could bring to the technology industry, and more than that, there was a potential for growth for myself.  

For example, in big companies, you get to do a lot of advanced stuff – you’ll do things that people have made strides to those mediums – but you may not have the opportunity to expand your horizons by doing that same vertical over and over.

Coming into Hubble as an engineer, I saw the opportunity to be able to branch myself out: to oversee how the system matures along with the company from a startup, encompassing good engineering practices along the way.

I dreamed of going through this phase of development as an engineer.

How Has the Experience Been So Far?

Julius: Let me start off by saying that I prefer insanity to peace – and every single day is action-packed.

You get to learn a lot of things when there are fires to fight. In peace-time, you are only focusing on a specific area of function. But in times of war, you are running around all over the place, helping to make sure everything is running well, and because of this, you get the chance to touch various verticals, learn from them, and also contribute a thing or two.

To top it all off, I had the opportunity to manage an amazingly talented team, which makes it very engaging and a fantastic experience overall.

Weiyuan: I’ve been working here since September 2020 and have been in many different teams within the company. Out of all the teams I’ve been in, the team managing the Hubble Workforce Management System stood out to me especially well. There’s a lot more care required because it’s more complex as compared to the rest of the systems, and more work has to be done over there, which led to much growth on my end.

Midway through December, I moved into helping out with another large project (merging 2 systems together), and although this is still something that is coming to fruition, it was a very good milestone for me.

Being able to explore the approaches of advancing our systems was a very enriching challenge in itself, and it was through collaboration with the engineers that helped to ensure that we worked towards the same objective, and this really helped me to constantly strive for success.

What Is Your Fondest Memory of Hubble?

Julius: When I joined in April last year, Hubble saw an opportunity to help the industry recover from the pandemic as the construction industry was pretty much trampled over by COVID19.

So within my first month working here, we decided to drop everything to build the Hubble One system as you know now. We started with barely anything, and after a lot of hard work, we managed to complete it in the span of 3 to 4 months.

I thought that it was very successful, albeit quite stressful, but it was memorable because everyone really came on board and helped solve this problem together. It wasn’t an easy journey, but certainly a rewarding one.

Weiyuan: We had a company event recently, and other than it being my first Hubble event, I finally had the chance to see all my colleagues in person! It was good to be able to see people and have fun with them.

The main highlight of the day was the white elephant gift exchange. Everyone was supposed to bring something that they didn’t want anymore, and we all had to decide whose gift was the most useful, and that person will have to bring everything back home. It was funny that somebody brought in a 5kg bag of rice, and I was bummed that he didn’t win. The person who won instead was somebody who brought in a keyboard.

I liked that I got to see people in their off-work personalities. People were laughing and stuff, we were bonding, and being able to see them off-work as well was a really good experience overall.

Where Do You See Hubble in the Coming Years?

Weiyuan: I feel that in 5 to 10 years from now, we will become an engineering powerhouse. Even right now, we have managed to attract some really cool people on board, like our 2 GDEs (Google Developer Experts), and I’m confident that more talented people will be joining the company in the near future.

Other than the newcomers, the current roster of engineering talents in Hubble is amongst the brightest and most hardworking people I’ve ever seen. I believe that we will eventually be able to show that we can do really good work as a whole, and as a result of that, push our product to greater boundaries.

That’s what I think, dream, and hope for.

Julius: ‘The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.’

We have a very strong core of people working here. These engineers are also very much respected by the engineering community. They do tech talks in places like Silicon Valley, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and places as far as Central Asia, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Bhutan.

But as with every company, there’s always going to be issues and mistakes, and over the course of the next several years, we will certainly make a lot more mistakes. And it is only in learning from our mistakes together can we bind up the wounds and make us better versions of ourselves faster. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

As long as we have a proper core with the right fundamentals, we can make a difference in this industry and beyond.

So there we go, we’ve just deep-dived into Julius and Wei Yuan’s lives at Hubble thus far, and as we conclude the first interview of our 3-part mini-series into ‘Life@Hubble’, we would like to reach out to you and invite you to join us here at Hubble – work with us to unify construction, and to building better cities of tomorrow.

See other Life@ Hubble writeups to find out more about the team:

• Meet our Senior Product Manager, Simon
• From Internship to Engineering Leaders – How Hubble Grooms Its Talent Pool