Jie Chen

What’s your background

My life started from growing up in the inner west suburbs of Sydney in Australia. My interest in programming started quite early in my life at around age fifteen. My interest started with my mother teaching my older brother coding when he was young! I naturally followed along and started studying computer science at UNSW. 

During my university years, I have always been interested in understanding the low-level languages of programming and took on courses that were focused on understanding concurrency and operating systems. From there, I have attended internships at Intuit, MongoDB and Nvidia. In the end, MongoDB had both an amazing culture and work ethic, so I attended MongoDB!

Tell us about your role at MongoDB and what it involves

I am a software engineer who works for the storage engines team. We are responsible for dealing with finding efficient methods to store customers’ data on servers. The team follows the concept of ACID database principles to strive for a database, which makes the role really fun!

What work have you been most excited about since starting your role? 

The storage engine teams created the open-source project called WiredTiger. The code repository is heavily complex and the team is very collaborative as well. Therefore, I am really excited to work with such a supportive team and work on complex problems with them! 

What’s something you’ve learnt about that surprised you on joining MongoDB?

The storage engines team is an important integral part of MongoDB! It always surprised me how much the team impacts the company. Furthermore, even though the team is such an important part of the team, the work you do has both complex and easy tasks as well. They are not all complex!

What do you love the most about your job? Which kind of task do you enjoy the most? 

Personally, I love the collaborative environment of the team in storage engines. Everyone in the team is an expert in parts of the complex system in the team, therefore having discussions and solving complex problems together has always been the task I enjoy the most.

What’s the coolest thing about your job? 

The code that the storage engines team manages has cutting-edge algorithms. We have a few select people who read research papers to make sure that we are always the most efficient. I found that so cool!

Are there any limitations to your job? Do you bear a lot of responsibility? Do you have to work on weekends? Are stress levels high?

The learning curve at the storage engines team is quite steep. The team does make a lot of effort to make sure that each engineer is learning at a pace that doesn’t become overwhelming too quickly. I feel like the responsibility is dispersed quite evenly within the team. MongoDB weighs very heavily on work-life balance. I have not worked on any weekends and have worked on a 9-5 schedule throughout my career here.

3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student…

1. To stop stressing about your career in university! I would often stress about what I wanted to do with the computer science degree. I was very focused on getting internships and finding a job. I now realised that I didn’t need to worry so early on about my career and it’s okay to just follow what you want to do and find what you really want to do in your life!
2. You are not going to apply everything you learn in university to your job! In fact, most of the things you learn in university do not apply to your software engineering job. Therefore you don’t need to be anxious if you don’t particularly understand a computer science concept, you most definitely won’t be using it in your daily job.
3. Be as social as you can in university! Making friends and attending any social events you would like in university is part of the whole experience. It’ll definitely be something that you would cherish after leaving university.

What tips can you share with prospective students who are going through the application or recruitment process? 

I think the biggest piece of advice that helped me was understanding that people only care about when you succeed. How many times do you fail an interview or get ghosted by a company, doesn’t mean anything and doesn’t get recorded? Your resume doesn’t show the number of times you have failed but rather only when you succeed. Therefore just take the mindset to slowly improve and you will get there eventually!