We catch up with Hadi Wibawa who, after studying Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London, went on to secure a role at BP as a Software Developer.
Why did you pick BP?
Because of their values, and the people. When I started a software development internship at BP in my penultimate year of university, I wasn’t sure I could deliver and I wasn’t sure how supportive people would be. But once I joined, my line manager assured me that my own technical development is equally as important as my day job. I gained a lot of confidence during that three month period, and that made me decide to stay with BP.
I also like BP’s diversity and inclusivity. I joined the company’s LGBT community (BP Pride), which is a community set up by and for BP employees. I feel that BP is very accepting of people’s differences. That kind of openness is really hard to find in a big company.
What skills or experiences at university best prepared you for your career at BP?
I actually studied a completely different subject at university to the role that I do now – I taught myself to code at age 13, but ended up not pursuing it as I was told I was too young, and so I ended up pursuing Chemical Engineering instead. As a software developer, the most challenging thing is that, as I did not take computing at university, I don’t know how I fare compared to others my age in this role. So every time I face a new challenge, I wonder whether others with an academic background in computing would have been able to solve it immediately or not. But then again, I have a good technical mentor that helps me out and gives constant feedback about my work.
What has surprised you about your role or the firm, since joining BP?
The hierarchy at BP is really flat and everyone is very approachable, so I have been able to get to know people who are really high-up in the organisation quite easily, which is surprising for a large organisation like BP.
How would you describe the culture and working environment?
I think that the work-life balance is amazing. It’s 9 until 5.30, mostly, and when we have a project the whole team keeps the standard really high whilst still meeting all the deadlines. I also find it very helpful that my line manager always assigns me projects that are aligned with my technical development goals. As already mentioned, BP is also very open and inclusive, and accepting of people’s differences.
Tell us about an average day at BP?
What I do day-in, day-out, is programming, which is what I love to do. I find it really exciting that all the projects I’m given always involve programming concepts and/or languages that are new to me. In the short time I’ve been at BP, I have learnt more than 7 programming languages.
What is your current role like?
My role is to develop the front office framework. This means that I create ‘scraping services’ that ‘scrape’ (or take) information from the web, such as information from National Grid about how much oil and gas is coming in every hour of every day. Since this information comes from many sources and in different formats, my team and I also develop a service that puts all of this information into one centralised location with a uniform format. This centralised location is called the front office framework.
Traders and analysts need a constant flow of information and therefore they rely on this framework to get that information intuitively, quickly and correctly.
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