In this blog post, the engineering team at Kelley Blue Book – which is part of the Cox Automotive family of brands – provides a behind-the-scenes peek into the technology that powers one of the most trusted resources in the automotive industry.
On the Kelley Blue Book (KBB) engineering team, we highly value the performance and availability of our applications to support our heavily trafficked consumer site.
Fortunately for us, these applications require only a relatively moderate amount of primarily read-only data, in the hundreds of thousands of data points for most of the core functionality across several high traffic areas. To achieve this core functionality, we do not often need to create or update existing information.
Our needs in a data store
Given our high availability and performance goals and our desire to ensure data consistency across systems, a highly-performant distributed data-store with great read capabilities seemed like the best match for our needs. Because we wanted our solution to be easily usable for multiple teams with slightly different data requirements, we elected to use a distributed cache approach, with independent caches allocated to each application to ensure separation of concerns.
The service we chose
Our applications run on AWS, so we chose to use ElastiCache, which provides the ability to choose from either Memcached or Redis. We ended up crafting our common codebase to be able to use either one, which gives our teams the ability to make the choices that work best, but the teams primarily ended up going with Memcached.
We have been using ElastiCache as a key-value store, where the values are JSON-encoded objects and the keys are unique, for instance matching the API endpoint that returns the data. This key syntax made it easy for us to write a simple function which allows us to utilize read-through caching, where our cache sits in front of the data store and we will make a request to the data store if the key is not found in the cache.
The benefits
This approach provides several benefits beyond just decreasing the response time of the current request. These additional benefits include reducing the strain on our APIs, improving our response times for subsequent requests and ensuring availability of previously requested data for the applications even if the underlying data store becomes unavailable or suffers from degraded performance. As shown in the graphic below, our response times are significantly higher when the cache is disabled. In fact, the average response time is almost doubled when the cache is disabled.
Pre-loading commonly requested fields
We have a good knowledge of which data will be most frequently utilized in our systems. As such, we chose to preload our high-level data, such as the details of each basic vehicle configuration. For requests that are likely not to be repeated, such as the pricing information for a fully configured vehicle for a specific location, we’ll make that request on demand.
We set a TTL (time to live) of the items in the cache to 8 hours and will “pre-cache” items every 6 hours, or whenever the data version for underlying data changes. We pre-cache anything that is likely to be requested multiple times. We have considered a few architectures for our approach to pre-caching, but for a few years now, we have been using AWS step functions, breaking different categories of data into different steps. We first run all the base steps, then we run the next set in parallel. For each step, we run those in parallel up to a maximum concurrency to ensure we fall below throttling limits.
By using this approach to storing and reading our data, our response times have decreased significantly, which helps our visitors search for their vehicle information approximately 50% faster than before. We’re really excited about the performance gains we have been able to make so far, and are looking forward to sharing more about our next set of improvements in a future blog post.
Learn how Cox Automotive technology teams are building a more connected and mobile future here.
Are you interested in joining our engineering team? Explore open positions here.
Ron Calderon is involved with testing Cox Automotive’s digital retailing platform to make sure it runs smoothly – and he could pass any pop culture trivia test with flying colors (we’ll have a more in-depth celebrity gossip chat with him another time). Elizabeth Saulsbury from our Employment Brand team sat down with Ron for the latest installment in our “Questions With” employee interview series.
Elizabeth: First things first. How are you today, Ron?
Ron: I’m amazing, Elizabeth.
E: Since we’re conducting this interview over video, I can see from the sun streaming in the window behind you that it’s a beautiful day in California. How long have you lived in The Golden State?
R: I was born and raised here in southern California, so I feel really spoiled. All my teammates are in Vermont, so I’m always giving them a hard time because we do have the best weather here. You can’t beat it.
E: You and I have chatted before and I know you’re a pop culture fanatic, so let me ask you this: what notable celebrity sightings have you had in SoCal?
R: Actually, not too many. A while back, I ran into Jamie Lee Curtis. And I saw Vince Vaughn at a restaurant once. I don’t know, is Vince Vaughn even relevant anymore?
E: I’m gonna say no.
R: Yeah. Anyway, those are the only two who come to mind right now.
E: You work in quality assurance at Cox Automotive. What’s your dream car?
R: Oddly, I’m not super into cars. I currently drive a Honda Civic, which I love, because it’s lasted me almost 15 years with little maintenance. I guess I would have to say my dream car would be a Porsche.
E: What motivates you during the workday?
R: My team communicates a lot. We’re always communicating and troubleshooting, and I think that’s what gets me pumped up. I’m the only person on my team who’s on the west coast, and they’re already communicating hours before I get up for the day. And seeing that communication before I start my day is motivating, because I already know what the day’s tasks are and what’s expected of me before I start.
E: Along the lines of communication…are you a texter or a caller?
R: I’m definitely a texter. It’s just so much easier, much faster.
E: Me too. Who was the last person you texted?
R: My best friend Brian.
E: Aside from speed-texting, what is a secret talent of yours?
R: Ooh. You know, we were talking about pop culture a minute ago, so I’ll circle back to that. I’m a pop culture whiz. I know so much random trivia. In fact, I’m part of the Pride ERG here at Cox and we just hosted a trivia event for employees that was all about pivotal LGBTQ+ pop culture moments throughout history. It was a ton of fun.
E: Last movie you saw?
R: It was a documentary on Tina Turner, who I love. It was amazing.
E: What’s a TV series that you loved to binge watch?
R: It’s so funny you bring that up, because I was binge-watching a show last night. I watched a new series on Hulu called Cruel Summer. I can’t stop watching it.
E: I know we need to move onto other topics, so this will be the last pop culture question, I promise: who’s a celebrity you look up to?
R: A celebrity I’ve always looked up to, even when I was a little kid because my mom was into her and I saw her twice in concert, would be Diana Ross.
E: That’s a great answer.
R: Oh, she’s amazing in concert. She’s the OG diva.
E: Tell me why people should work at Cox.
R: What I love about Cox is how they empower employees to explore their interests. For example, I’m working in a technology field, but I also have a creative side and I’ve been able to work with employee resource groups like PRIDE, Women With Drive and Ignite to explore that creative aspect of myself.
E: Tell me something you learned during COVID-19.
R: COVID-19 was definitely a reset for me. At first it was scary, but working from home has been amazing. I feel like my work-life balance is better than ever – I’m saving 15 hours a week not sitting in traffic. My place is always clean and tidy, I’m not rushing out the door all the time. So COVID-19 has really taught me to slow down and reset. I know a lot of people say that and it’s kind of corny, but it’s true for me.
E: When you think about what you want to be known for – what you want your legacy to be – how would you sum that up?
R: I like to make people laugh and make people feel comfortable. I want to be a nice person. I want to bring joy to people.
E: Well Ron, you certainly brought a lot of joy to my day with this interview, so thank you!
R: Thanks Elizabeth!
Interested in learning more about Cox’s culture? Click here.
This month, we’re spotlighting the people who work Behind the Code at Cox. Read below to learn how our technology employees are building a better tomorrow.
For Tonya Wallace, being agile is a way of life.
We’re not just talking about being flexible and resilient (though as a hardworking mother of six, Tonya has plenty of experience with that too!). We’re referring also to Agile methodology: an IT project management approach used to deliver fast, high-quality technology solutions.
Tonya, Director of Agile Delivery at Cox Automotive, is an advocate and user of the agile methodology and its accompanying frameworks. She knows firsthand that the methodology allows for collaboration and quicker results.
“Our company drives to the same scaled agile framework, which helps to deliver high business value in short-cycle increments,” Tonya explained. “That’s the whole point of agility: to get the product out to the customer as quickly as possible, to get feedback as quickly as possible and to iterate on what that feedback is.”
Tonya leads agile delivery for four release trains. Each powers finance and insurance solutions that enable the behind-the-scenes of the car-buying process, such as digital contracting and lender aftermarket products. The newest of her release trains will lead Cox Automotive’s AWS migration to cloud services in a two-year effort.
The importance of agility really hit home for Tonya in March 2020, when COVID struck and automotive dealers could not be on-site in their offices.
“So what do you do if you’re a dealer who’s still relying on paper and face-to-face transactions?” said Tonya. “We quickly pivoted and delivered assisted remote signing out into the field. That’s the benefit of having smart people working within an agile framework. We broke down silos. People worked across different teams and trains, and we leveraged our remote environment like nobody’s business.”
Tonya’s tech roots were planted in 2002 when she opened a small, minority-owned tech company to build custom applications with small teams of developers.
“I fell in love with requirements, automation, collaboration, iterative development and relentless improvement,” Tonya said of her first experience in the field. “I didn’t find out about Agile until years later, and I went back to school for my MBA in project management in order to enhance my understanding and knowledge about the project management discipline.”
Post-graduation, Tonya hit the ground running with her new passion and skills.
She was hired as a business analyst with the Department of Revenue, where she participated in Agile transformation. She moved on to a pharmaceutical company, where she led the cloud platform Agile team as a process specialist and trainer, coach and consulting liaison. Afterwards, she became senior scrum master and Agile coach at an automotive technology company. But in these positions, Tonya said she found the project management process to be – well, not agile.
“It was very heavy, very rigorous, very stringent,” Tonya said about one experience. “No one led with the ‘why,’ so people didn’t understand why we were doing things the way we were doing them, and if we lack buy-in, it creates gaps.”
A friend who worked at Cox recommended that Tonya explore a position with the company. In 2018, Tonya became a senior release train engineer for Cox Automotive’s DealerTrack brand. Not only did Tonya find Cox’s tech teams more conducive to Agile, but her leadership skills blossomed in Cox’s flexible environment too. Tonya has since spearheaded initiatives, facilitated DISC personality trainings and served as a thought leader in the industry.
Tonya has the heart of a teacher, and that translates to her life outside of work too. She loves being able to nurture and coach her daughter and five sons.
“The way I parent is the way I coach an agile team,” she said. “I believe the strong foundational principles of having the confidence to fail fast, self-organize, be courageous and transparent and drive toward relentless improvement builds solid character. I will often run mini retrospectives after practices and games!”
Tonya contrasted Cox with other companies when it comes to valuing employees.
“I love that Cox gives engineers a voice,” she said. “I’ve seen workplaces where it’s more of a ‘just sit there and code’ type of environment. Not here. They encourage communication and transparency. All teams have the ability to share ideas. We have senior leaders inboxing engineers to say things like ‘How are you? Is everything going okay? I saw you did XYZ today and I wanted to thank you.’ I’ve never had that at any other company.”
Tonya said one reason why voices are elevated at Cox is because it’s a culture of achievement.
“This is an organization of high-performers,” Tonya said (and she would know!). “What we do matters. We’re creating things that will progress our culture, our environment, our world and how we do business tomorrow.”
Tonya, who is part of Cox’s diversity and inclusion working group, added that Cox is intentional about its stance on increasing numbers of minority employees in leadership positions and nurturing talent and diverse employees within the company.
And the cherry on top?
“Sometimes in companies, you’ll find personalities clashing and a cutthroat environment. I’ve found that people here are nice. I mean, actually, genuinely nice. We’re constantly pushing the message of collaboration, communication and respect. I’ve never seen leaders so accommodating and caring.”
Interested in learning more about the people who make innovation happen at Cox? Check out the rest of our Behind the Code series and follow along on social using #BehindTheCode.
This month, we’re spotlighting the people who work Behind the Code at Cox. Read below to learn how our technology employees are building a better tomorrow.
In another life, Emmet McGuire might have been a carpenter.
It’s something of a family business: his father, uncles and brother all do carpentry for a living. And while Emmet isn’t a craftsman by trade, he loves building things and always has a project happening at his home in Burlington, VT.
His talent for constructing things makes Emmet a natural fit for his role as a Lead Software Test Engineer at Cox Automotive.
“I think my family’s history of carpentry instilled in me the passion to build things the right way, which translates well to developing software,” he said.
In 2009, Emmet started working a software tester at Dealer.com (acquired by Cox Automotive in 2015). He’s been promoted many times since, becoming a QA tester, a QA engineer, a senior QA engineer, a lead QA engineer and a senior software test engineer before moving into his current position.
Emmet loves the variety of projects he’s worked on at Cox.
“I have had the opportunity to work in different product spaces over the years,” he said. “When I was part of the Dealer.com group, I worked on teams that developed our websites as well as the backend services which support our websites and inventory. I got to work on projects for large customers like Ford and Subaru, but also projects that were used by the millions of users shopping for cars on Dealer.com websites.”
Emmet was an electrical engineer at a large technology company before joining Dealer.com.
“That switch was like a breath of fresh air to me,” he said. “I took computer science classes as part of my education and I always enjoyed them, but it wasn’t until I started my career as an electrical engineer that I realized hardware wasn’t for me. I wanted to work on software.”
Emmet explained that in his previous job, projects took months or even years to complete.
“But being on an Agile Scrum team at Cox Auto, we work in two-week sprints and that’s a much better pace for me. You also have a much closer working relationship with your team, and that’s what I needed to be successful.”
Emmet credits those close relationships with his growth as a technical leader. And he loves the fact that he and his colleagues have a prominent voice in the company.
“Working in tech at Cox Automotive is simultaneously fun, exciting, challenging and rewarding,” he said. “I think for a lot of companies, the testing role is looked at as an afterthought or secondary to the development team, but that couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to Cox Auto.”
Cox’s tech team members are high performers, and Emmet said he is consistently challenged to evolve the way he develops and tests software. One example he gave was the company’s switch from traditional development and release processes to CI/CD, which brings with it a slew of challenges.
“As a team, we had to learn what the implications of that were, and how to best handle it,” he said. “I am very proud of the process that we came up with, and we feel extremely comfortable releasing production changes that impact millions of users a month multiple times a day without users noticing any issues.”
Emmet explained that when there is an issue, his team almost always knows about it before any customers do.
“For the application my team owns, we have a 99.95% availability, so we can’t have many outages and we’ve been able to keep that standard, while releasing as frequently as we do. From a testing point of view, the primary process we use for maintaining that availability through all our releases are Blue/Green deploys, and running automated tests on the inactive instance before routing traffic to the new instance. That’s a massive oversimplification, but that’s a critical process for achieving the high level of success that we have been able to achieve.”
COVID has changed a lot of things about the average workweek. Emmet believes that his team’s relationships and rapport have remained intact.
“In terms of environment and culture, my team is like my second family,” he said. “I really enjoy working with every single person, and they are all incredibly smart, thoughtful people. I don’t think there is a single person at Cox Auto that I couldn’t learn from, and that’s a very humbling experience.”
Interested in learning more about the people who make innovation happen at Cox? Check out the rest of our Behind the Code series and follow along on social using #BehindTheCode.
This month, we’re spotlighting the people who work Behind the Code at Cox. Read below to learn how our technology employees are building a better tomorrow.
You can easily catch glimpses of Jenny Clyne’s creative personality in her work-from-home space.
A sewing project is tacked on a whiteboard, evidence of her passion for crafting. A big collection of books graces the shelf behind her, including many by her favorite author, Dean Koontz. Tucked away elsewhere are drafts of novels she’s writing herself (she promises to remember us when she’s a famous author). And she’ll frequently rock a funky fashion accessory during the workday, like pink monster feet slippers.
Being empowered to bring her full self to work is one of the things Jenny loves about Cox.
“You are who you are, and Cox won’t try to change that,” she said. “That means a lot to me. I am who I am and not one person here has tried to tell me differently. And that’s the first time I’ve experienced that.”
Jenny said that when she began her Cox journey, she was first struck by the supportive people and leadership.
“Cox’s culture is different than anything I’ve experienced,” she said. “Here at Cox, there’s a theme of family – meaning you’re part of a gigantic family and everyone matters. And it’s true. Everyone matters. I’ve met tons of people at Cox, and that’s how it is. Everyone is part of something magnificent here.”
Jenny is a Project Support Specialist with Cox Communications’ Field Engineering and Operations group. Jenny, who lives in Wichita, KS, moved into this role three years ago after being a contractor for Cox. Her role requires a sharp eye for logistics and project management.
“I support the group of engineers that build Cox Communications’ engineering work package,” Jenny explained. “They look at the entire network to determine what pieces of equipment a customer needs. Our engineers get together and look at the map to see how the network is built and basically build a to-do list for our technicians: the equipment that’s needed, what they need to build and where they need to install it.”
Jenny’s project oversight extends beyond Kansas to include cities in Nebraska, Arkansas and Oklahoma, requiring her to be nimble and communicative with her fellow tech employees. But that’s a challenge Jenny welcomes, especially after a stagnant experience at a previous company.
“I felt like I had plateaued there,” Jenny shared. “And I didn’t like the culture and how they treated employees. You can’t survive in that atmosphere – you don’t have any room to grow.”
For someone like Jenny, who is always on the lookout for a new adventure, the culture of Cox was a breath of fresh air.
“Cox is different from companies I worked for previously because it’s an enterprise of learning,” Jenny said. “They have a mindset of making YOU better. We aren’t just achieving goals. We’re here to make new ones. There’s always room for improvement and asking ‘what’s next.’”
As an example, Jenny shared details about a big project she recently completed: helping transition the Field Engineering and Operations group to a new project platform.
“We were struggling with the old platform; it wasn’t working right, and it was slowing us down,” Jenny said. “This one speeds us up and helps us produce more information that we need to fulfill customer expectations.”
It was a big undertaking, and Jenny was given the opportunity to train others, lend ideas and resolve issues – and eventually become the project’s subject matter expert for Cox’s central region.
“Working with this group really broadened my family at Cox. I learned so many different things and the rapport we all had with each other was a blessing.”
Jenny’s experience with this project gave her a renewed passion for her job in technology at Cox.
“I have an amazing group of people, an amazing team to back me up. It makes me want to push harder and go farther than I have in my life.”
Now that she’s been with Cox for three years, Jenny said that she can’t imagine working anywhere else: “Cox is stuck with me until I retire.”
Jenny is especially encouraged by Cox’s focus on emerging technologies and building a better future.
“Cox is innovation itself and is highly adaptive to the fluid changes of the world,” she said. “We have a beautiful future ahead. We don’t just see the horizon; we see past it to something that can and will be. And with all of us working together, we make it happen.”
Interested in learning more about the people who make innovation happen at Cox? Check out the rest of our Behind the Code series and follow along on social using #BehindTheCode.
This month, we’re spotlighting the people who work Behind the Code at Cox. Read below to learn how our technology employees are building a better tomorrow.
Zeddikia Chisholm vividly remembers his unconventional experience of learning to swim.
On a trip to Guadalupe River in Texas, Zeddikia jumped from a swinging rope and plunged into the water below before making his way back to shore. After many more similar jumps, he was swimming with ease.
Zeddikia’s approach to learning new things at Cox Communications is very similar.
“That’s how I learn new skills: jump into the deep end and figure it out,” he said. “From the moment I started as an intern at Cox, I would challenge myself with projects that required new proficiencies. My skills with R, Python, JavaScript and Tableau are all skills that I developed by stretching myself at Cox.”
Zeddikia is now an Atlanta-based Network Engineer on Cox’s Systems Engineering team. He previously held roles on Cox’s Network Planning Automation (NPA) and Customer Premise Engineering teams.
“I’m an explorer at heart, so the opportunity to learn about different departments, leaders, places and people was priceless,” Zeddikia said. “Anything that gives me opportunities to learn or experience something new is a win in my book.”
This explorer at heart is currently learning SysML, a modeling language that supports the specification, analysis, design, verification and validation of a broad range of systems and systems-of-systems.
“It’s a new thing for us, and I get to help lay the foundation of its implementation here at Cox,” Zeddikia said. “I believe that my work on this current team shows that Cox is open to change and trying new ways of doing things.”
COVID-19 – aka “the vid” or “-rona,” as he calls it – has impacted Zeddikia’s work life in a number of ways. The most obvious, of course, is the fact that he has been working remotely for almost a year.
“Working from home has been a great time-saver and energy-saver, as I no longer waste my energy in Atlanta traffic before coming to work. The peace of mind that I can keep my family safe, and still do my job is great. I have an incredible amount of flexibility with the current environment and it has been a lifesaver as far as stress levels go.”
But Zeddikia also felt empowered by the opportunity to participate in an important coronavirus project for Cox.
“Since the pandemic started, I’ve been working on the Executive COVID-19 Impact Report,” he shared. “In short, we are looking at the effects of COVID-19 on our network. The increase in work-from-home, distance learning and other factors had initially strained our networks quite a bit. The congestion levels in many of our markets had risen to crazy high levels.”
Zeddikia said that he was proud of the insights his team was able to provide because it helped the company respond proactively to the situation before it impacted customers.
“With our work on the Node Congestion Relief Analytics Team, we were recognized and awarded a Synergy Award. I was happy to receive my first award as a full-time employee and put it on the fireplace since I don’t have an office desk these days!”
Zeddikia explained that his team’s inherent love of engineering and data analytics has created a culture that is very relaxed and focused on the end results.
“If I looked in my team members’ closets, I would guess the first shirt I would see would say ‘I Love Engineering’ or ‘Show me the Data,’ Jerry Maguire,” Zeddikia said. “I like that my team brings their passion to their work. It makes me happy to see this.”
Zeddikia loves that the culture of Cox encourages technology employees to bring their full selves to work.
“The backgrounds of people in engineering alone are incredibly diverse,” he said. “In engineering, I know people that have a background in music, psychology and other fields you wouldn’t normally expect in a hardcore engineering environment. It is this diversity that has led to a lot of the fun I have talking with different people.”
Zeddikia is among the employees with a cool assortment of hobbies and talents outside of work.
“I spend a lot of my free time creating websites, building things and designing things on my laser cutter,” he said. “I spent 2020 learning construction skills because I’ve always wanted to, and I plan to continue in 2021. I also enjoy staying active. Just last week I signed up for my first Spartan Beast, a 21- kilometer 60-obstacle course race through the Nevada desert in November. I’ve done Spartan Supers (10 km, 25 obstacles) before, but this Beast is on another level. What could be more fun!”
Interested in learning more about the people who make innovation happen at Cox? Check out the rest of our Behind the Code series and follow along on social using #BehindTheCode.
Up Close Interview with David Rice, Senior Vice President of Product & Engineering
David Rice is a Senior Vice President of Product & Engineering at Cox Automotive and works in Austin, TX. We chatted with David about his story, his passion for cultivating early-career talent, and his advice to software developers.
Q: Hi David! Tell us about your Cox career story, and tell us what you do.
A: I was part of vAuto when it was acquired by Autotrader in 2010; at the time, I was a senior software engineer. After joining Cox, I became a product engineering leader and at some point or another, I’ve have worked on almost every retail software product.
Before vAuto, I worked for a start-up called Digital Motorworks. I got really good at fixing problems, and that was where I first got to see the effect of systems thinking: seeing how complex systems get put together. And you can put that same thinking into understanding how an organization should flow and interconnect, and how to fix its problems. For the past 10 years, I’ve been applying that same thought process: ‘how do I get the system working, and what are its breakages?’
Q: It sounds like you’ve had the opportunity to impact many projects and witness a lot of change. What have you learned from those experiences that you would share with early-career professionals?
A: All the change has led me to understand is that it’s okay not to perfectly understand everything. You know, coming from a software engineering background, I always want stuff to be binary/black and white. And the reality is, sometimes the complexity is just too high. You’re not always going to understand, and you only sometimes have the time to break things down into the smallest parts to fully understand. Accept that some level of inability to understand is okay and learn when to make decisions with incomplete knowledge.
Q: You’ve given presentations to students at the University of Texas about the things you wish you had known at the start of your career. Tell us about the backstory of those presentations.
A: When I was in college, a friend’s dad gave me a call while I was working in a non-computer science-related job. He gave me a summer job in Computer Science (CS) and fundamentally, what he said to me was: ‘I want you to come in because I think you’re going to cause trouble with the team. You don’t know what you can’t do, so you’re going to go down paths that the team has dismissed. They are moving too slow and taking too long.’ So, I got to experience that as a young professional, and it challenged me because I wanted to go in and prove myself.
I’ve seen that pattern with people who are fresh out of school. They bring new learnings and they come from places of new perspectives. At vAuto, I wanted to bring in students because I thought they provided a sense of exuberance and energy. Knowing that, I decided to go to the University of Texas to talk to some of these students and see if we could bring them on board.
Q: What was the main thing you wanted students to take away from your presentation?
A: I was told that I’d be doing an “info-session,” where I would essentially come in and talk to the students about what my company does. And I thought, ‘I don’t want to do that – that’s so boring!’ So instead, I wanted to take a perspective of “what I wish I knew.”
When you start in tech, the thing you’re most interested in is writing code and creating cool things. But the reality is, there are a whole bunch of facets of the field that you don’t figure out until later. You don’t necessarily know the right questions to ask to get you to the answers. So that’s what I wanted to talk to them about. We got great feedback from the students and my team. I’ve done the presentation about four times now. And I’ve been able to push for a lot of early-career hires at Cox. Want to know David’s top questions to ask? Check out our helpful guide.
Q: What other advice would you give to early-career developers?
A: The key is a diversity of skills. Make sure you’ve looked at different data constructs, programs, and programming languages. Having diversity of skills means that you can learn. You need to be able to demonstrate that. If you show me that you can learn skills and talk intelligently about them, that’s what I look for in hires.
One of my favorite interview questions is “how do you use software to solve problems around you that aren’t work-related?” A common behavior I’ve seen with great software developers is that they do stuff with the software even outside of their jobs. They solve real problems with it. For example, one of my early-career hires, Stacy, was active in collecting anime merchandise and she wrote a program to store her entire collection in a database. Those kinds of behaviors, that kind of passion…you can’t teach that, so I hone in on those kinds of questions in the interview process.
Q: If you could go back in time to the early stages of your career, what would you tell yourself?
A: Three things. First, I would tell myself not to get so stuck on closing doors to certain things. When I was in my early career, I was determined that I wouldn’t be in management. There was a lot of binary thought in that way. So, I would tell myself to get over myself a bit, and that it’s okay to look at other options.
Secondly, I’d ask myself: whom do I want to work with? These are people that you’re going to spend a lot of time with. Are these people that you can learn with and hang out with? Make sure they are. You spend more waking time at work than with your family.
And, the last thing is, find a mentor. The mentoring relationship is best done when both people have something to learn. Find someone who can tell you things you don’t know, has experience in a path you want to take and make sure they get something out of the relationship as well.
Special thanks to David for sharing his story and insights. To learn more about vAuto, visit the company’s website. To learn more about a technology career at Cox, visit our technology page.
During the fall of 2018, Daisy Hibbard, Scrum Master for Dealertrack, a Cox Automotive brand, received a phone call that dramatically changed her life. Never backing down from a challenge, Daisy fought for her health and her family and came out on top!
Two years ago, Daisy was the Manager of Internal Events and Community Relations for NextGear Capital, a Cox Automotive brand. However, little did she know that her position would be impacted after Cox Automotive announced a workforce reduction. She was devastated but determined to get back in the working world as soon as she could. Daisy was pleased with the way she was treated when she was laid off and was hopeful to return to Cox. Within 90 days, after earning her Professional Scrum Master certification she was hired as a Scrum Master for Dealertrack. Ironically, her new job was in the same building where she had started her career several years ago.
During a Monday morning team meeting, Daisy received an important phone call that would forever change her life—she was diagnosed with Stage 1 breast cancer. Immediately after her doctor called, she contacted her husband of 13 years, Brett, to share the news. Any person would have fallen apart upon receiving this news, but not Daisy. She kept her head high and willingly went back into the meeting staying calm and collected. Daisy explained, “I just kept repeating in my head, ‘No need to panic. I have the most curable kind of cancer. It’s going to be ok.’”
There are not many people in the world that can receive such traumatic information and keep level-headed in a meeting. Luckily, Daisy was able to maintain a positive attitude throughout the duration of her chemotherapy. She had a loving and supportive team at Cox who were her cheerleaders from the beginning, which helped her keep pushing through.
“I don’t think I could have done all this without the love and support from my coworkers. It made this whole process a lot easier and less painful.”
Not a worry in sight about stacks of bills and money, Daisy was able to focus on relaxing and doing the things she enjoys. She attributes this freedom to the Cox employee healthcare benefits.
“I will forever be grateful for Cox’s amazing healthcare benefits. Instead of having to stress about a mountain of hospital bills, my husband and I were able to stay on track with our goals of creating a garden and planting fruit trees. I don’t think I could have made it through chemotherapy without Cox’s short-term disability benefit.”
The process and several rounds of chemo is physically and emotionally draining, but Daisy didn’t let anything prevent her from doing the things she loves. After her final round of chemo, she and her husband planted six fruit trees and built five gardens. They also began composting and planting several flowers to attract honey bees. According to Daisy, she says; “my neighbors probably think cancer turned me into a ‘hippie,’ but cancer made me realize what’s most important in life: the small things.”
Thank you, Daisy, for sharing your story! If you want to read more articles like this one, view our open jobs or experience a day in the life at Cox? Venture over to our Careers page to learn more about our jobs in Tech.
In a fast-paced organization, balancing multiple programs can a be a challenge. However behind every solution are some incredibly cool folks in product, engineering and operations making it happen. Our technology teams in Austin are no different and they make the product portfolio of vAuto possible!
Checking in from Austin is Product Marketing Manager Matt Spurlock who shares what it’s like to work alongside the product engineering teams there. Learn how he not only helps spotlight the products from our technology teams, but also how he works with those teams across vAuto to help them better understand the problem they’re solving and who they’re solving it for.
By: Matt Spurlock
As I sit here catching up on the veritable mountain of work this evening, I almost find it difficult to prioritize. Each activity is another exciting step in a slew of new product marketing projects and initiatives which all promise to lead vAuto and her brands to new heights. That said, it’s so exciting and interesting, I hardly mind the mountain!
It was one year ago when I submitted my application to a new position opening on the Product Marketing team. At the time, I had already been with Cox Automotive for 6 years as a Product Manager at vAuto but was looking to grow skills and broaden my career. All of a sudden, a friend came out of nowhere to let me know his team was looking to expand. After a long interview process, I was offered the job and with nervous excitement I accepted. It is difficult to express how happy I have been with my decision to make the leap into what was very unchartered territory. It was, and continues to be a steep learning curve, but through the process we’ve begun to make great pioneering strides in Product Marketing for vAuto and Cox Automotive.
In the Austin office I have pretty open access to our mobile and desktop developer teams, product, and operations. As a matter of fact, I have even had the privilege of training some of them on both the products themselves and the dealer market we work in!
To describe my role in better detail, it helps to understand the other main roles in the office, what we do and how we work together.
My job in product marketing is to support them all from both ends of the cycle.
On the front end, Product Marketing gets to help Product and Engineering better understand the market. Competitive analysis, Win/Loss Research, focus groups and survey feedback can all help feed the folks designing, building and prioritizing the next big thing with good solid facts instead of just using their gut.
As a product reaches the launch phase, I get to help tell the story to our marketing partners creating collateral and to those speaking directly to the dealers. I also gather information about how the product is received by our clients and feed that back into Product and Engineering. Thus, starting the whole cycle over again!
My experience and the relationships I have here allow me to both receive and provide valuable context across a broad spectrum. Having so many of these relationships in house is one of the things that makes working at the Austin office so special! Also making it special is the foundation and backing of Cox Automotive while maintaining the agile, startup spirit. What’s more is how many leaders we have that have been here since we actually were a startup! It’s truly a neat place to be. There’s been a great deal of growth, both from myself and vAuto over these seven years. With the camaraderie and support we give one another; I know I can look forward to the next seven and beyond!
Want to read more articles like this one, view job opportunities that speak to your passions and experience a day in the life at Cox? Venture over to our Technology Careers page to learn more.
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