My perspective on life at Pusher as a marketing intern

This is me 👩‍💼

I started at Pusher in June, shortly after finishing my exams at university. I studied economics in my undergrad but wanted to move into the tech industry so I was looking for a suitable role to combine my skills with my interests. Pusher is a developer tools company so the industry was a good match, but the question was about the role I would take and whether it was the right culture fit. After interviewing, I ended up joining the marketing team as an intern and I can honestly say that even with the amazing weather in the beginning of the summer I haven’t had a single day where I didn’t want to go to work in the morning. In this blog post I’ll tell you all about my experience at Pusher and what made my work so enjoyable.

First weeks

Let’s start from the very beginning and my first impressions of the company. The first time I heard about Pusher was at a hackathon way before I was even looking for an internship. However, I was there with the sole purpose of learning, so the only thing that stuck with me about Pusher then was that their t-shirts are pretty cool. Therefore, the first time I visited the Pusher office, I only knew what I had learned online and heard from my friends. I was very happy to see a relaxed open plan workspace and hear a few conversations that left me a (correct) impression of a collaborative and friendly team. I had a very interesting chat about the internship and Pusher in general with my team lead, Amina, so I left feeling super excited about the opportunity to work here.

The Pusher crowd at the London Zoo late night opening 🦁. This was my first company outing and it took place at the end of my first week, such a great chance to get to know everyone.

My first few days at Pusher were full of learning and getting to know everyone. The first step was to go around the office and meet everyone face to face. I didn’t remember many names by the end of my first day, but everyone was super welcoming and quite a few people encouraged me to go to them with questions. Pusher has a very technical product so I had to familiarise myself with a lot of complicated concepts. Therefore, it was good to know there were people ready to help me whenever I got confused. There is also a lot of documented information readily available for new-joiner orientation, which meant that I left my first day with a big headache from the load of information I had managed to consume.

I received my first task on my second day and even though it was partly to help me get a better knowledge of the market, there were people in the team who were quite interested in its outcome. This reassured me that I wasn’t going to be doing useless work and so far I indeed haven’t had to deliver a single coffee, take papers around the office or any other cliche intern task. Instead, I’ve been able to contribute with my own ideas, had access to the management of the company to discuss my work and have also been part of a variety of projects that exposed me to different sides of marketing. Overall, my onboarding experience can be described as a steep learning curve supported by friendly and welcoming faces ready to help out whenever needed.

What’s the culture like at Pusher?

From the first office visit, I got the feeling that Pusher will be a great culture fit for me so my expectations were quite high. I am not just talking about the easily noticeable benefits like a huge variety of unlimited snacks or a great selection of different entertainment options. These are nice social behaviours, but culture is centered on bringing the Pusher values to life. For me the general attitude of everyone at Pusher was very important. People here are not afraid to express their opinions and admit failure while still recognising success.We use 15Five as a feedback tool and each week everyone in the company sends out high-fives to colleagues. These get published in a company-wide Slack channel.This is nice because it also offers an overview of what people are doing in different teams.

Learning is another big part of the culture here, at Pusher. I am always encouraged to get involved in projects I find interesting even if they don’t concern my role directly. For example, I had the opportunity to do some programming for our internal data services which I found super exciting as I’ve been teaching myself programming over the past few years and could finally put those skills to work.

I also like that there’s constant search for feedback and prompt reactions to ensure continuous improvement. A coworker of mine started a discussion around women in the company and one topic was about having basic women’s sanitary products in the toilets. I was very impressed to see a big variety of things in nice little drawers in the bathroom the very next day. It’s a detail that perfectly demonstrates the company’s attitude towards its employees.

The unique stuff

There are some cool peculiarities of the Pusherinos. One of them is their constant conversation about good food. There’s a Slack channel dedicated to food, a separate one for going to lunch in the office area and a whole internal page with suggestions of places to eat. My bucket list is constantly growing and there is no way I will manage to go everywhere before the summer is over.

Secondly, a lot of communication here is done over Slack, and this sometimes happens even if the person is sitting right next to you. This helps keep track of what has been discussed and also sometimes creates humorous conversations on company-wide channels resulting in clusters of people giggling to themselves behind their laptops.

Thirdly, quite a few people are involved in different tech communities and regularly give talks on different subjects. This kind of involvement is encouraged by the company, as Pusher does a lot of outreach and hosts meetups in the office (you can check out the talks here, yes Pusher also records them ✨). There’s so much more I could talk about in this post but it would get too long so I’d encourage you to keep an eye on their Twitter account for announcements of upcoming meetups/events and come meet the team to find out more.

This is from one of the meetups we hosted at the office, the presenter is Jim, one of the Pusher engineers, as I mentioned, it’s a thing here.

The environment surrounding me plays a big role in my personal development and Pusher has definitely had a positive influence in that aspect. It’s the combination of the company culture and opportunities for professional development that made me love my job.

I hope you got a sense of what it’s like to work at Pusher and if this sounds interesting, Pusher is hiring, so check out their jobs page 🚀. You can also find out more about Pusher on social media: Twitter, GitHub, Facebook, LinkedIn.