Petros Markopoulos, ‘23 is an international alum from Greece. He graduated from Williams in 2023 and is now working as a Software Engineer at Asana, a software company based in San Francisco, CA.
What is your role, and what does your day-to-day entail?
I’ve been a Software Engineer at Asana for about 4 months now. My team used to be in charge of developing features for administrators and large enterprises and is now working on expanding the way that objects can be shared within our product. With direction from our manager and tech lead, my team breaks down goals into smaller – often well-defined – tasks, which I spend most of my time coding solutions for. These include front-end work, like UI changes that allow customers to use the new features we develop, or back-end work, like updating our permissions model. While this work can be interesting, I’ve had the most fun being challenged with higher-level design work. I’ve recently begun training to be on-call for my team, which means that for a week at a time, I’ll be responsible for addressing any issues or questions brought up by our customers or other engineers within the company. For my team, typical on-call problems tend to be about our older projects, on which I haven’t worked directly, so it’s been a great opportunity for me to familiarize myself with those parts of the codebase.
What experiences, either professional or extracurricular, do you think lend well to a good candidate in the space?
Well, I returned as a full-time employee after doing an internship the summer before my Senior year, so I guess that’s something useful. The question then is what to do to get one of those. I think that working on independent projects, such as creating a website or an app, is a great way to develop and demonstrate skills that employers look for. However, class projects at Williams can be a better starting point: polishing and/or extending one of them and uploading it to a repo demonstrates your understanding of core computer science concepts, as well as your curiosity, which, in my opinion, is much more valuable than just learning React.
Do people usually stay in the space or transition into other fields? Is the knowledge you gain transferable?
I’ve heard and seen that people move between and within companies a lot; in fact, a couple of my coworkers have left to join startups, some have moved from developer to manager roles, while plenty of people at Asana have been there for years and have no desire to leave – all of this within the last four months. From my understanding, it is important to have some sort of plan and be deliberate about the skills one is developing. My manager has been very helpful in this respect, giving me a variety of tasks to try while checking in and pushing me towards the things I find most engaging.
Personally, I know that I’ll stay close to computer science and/or software. I want to get to a point where I do more system design, which as I mentioned, is what I find most fun, and getting to that point takes time. Grad school is also definitely something I’m considering for the future, although that’s by no means a requirement to do very impactful work.