A Day in the Life of Evan Fleischman, Lead Engineer at Evident
August 6, 2021
A Day in the Life of Evan Fleischman, Lead Engineer at Evident
“We’re really product-driven as far as an engineering team goes, and I always find that having a visual goal to keep in mind and having a deliverable that you know will sell is what helps us develop in the right direction,” said Evan Fleischman, Lead Engineer at Evident. “There’s a lot of thought and some very tangible reasons behind what we’re doing, and I think we operate really well as a startup in the sense that we’re in-flux and trying to figure out where we fit best as a product solution instead of trying the same thing over and over just because it’s easier.”
Evan originally joined Evident as an Integration Engineer in October 2019, and was quickly promoted to Lead Software Engineer in December 2020. He’s part of a team of skilled engineers that are responsible for building and growing the platform behind Evident’s fully automated, end-to-end insurance verification solution.
“We’re constantly updating that and making the best decision with the information we have, so it’s not a straight line and we’re providing the reasons why we’re doing that,” Evan added. “The ability to say we were wrong and learning from our mistakes is what keeps us agile and flexible for the next iteration.”
To give you an idea of what it’s like to work at one of Atlanta’s Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies, Evan gave us insight into his daily schedule, his role at Evident, and why he loves being part of the engineering team.
8:30 am – I recently started setting an alarm for 8:30, but before that I was crafting my mornings around our 9:30 standup with our engineering team in Kraków, Poland.
9:30 – 10 am – The idea behind this morning meeting is to kick off the day, because we only have a few hours of overlap with Poland hours, so we want to maximize that. I like the stand-up because the team in Poland has already been working on a number of things that day, and we can pick up tasks where they leave off. Seeing what they’ve been working on always gives me momentum for the day. Sometimes these morning meetings will include demos from the team – a product demo or people showing off what they’ve been working on – sometimes it ropes into backlog grooming and project planning for the next few days.
10 am – 12pm – Mornings can sometimes be crazy! There’s a lot of communication, especially from the U.S. side – making sure we get the proper handoff from Poland, and making sure we utilize those hours if we want to do some peer programming to bounce ideas off each other, so we do that during this time. I personally don’t code well in the morning, so I try to get my coding done in the afternoon and do more administrative stuff in the morning.
After the morning meeting, I’m usually catching up on emails and with coworkers on Slack and seeing if anything big happened or if any questions were answered from the day before which helps me determine what’s to come. That sometimes means I’m jumping on a call with someone in Poland as their day is closing out to make sure we’re on the same page.
As a Lead Engineer, I want to make sure everyone knows what they’re working on the next day, and that nobody’s doing double work and that we’re prioritizing the correct things. I try to chat with my team before lunch, because it’s usually at this time during the day that we realize we missed something in our original planning, or a bug surfaces itself, and we want to make sure we address any inconsistencies to make sure we’re operating in tandem for the next day.
12 – 1pm – If I’m ordering lunch, I’ll use my GrubHub budget from Evident and get something delivered. I’ve been playing as much golf as I possibly can these days, and my fiancée and I just recently moved closer to a golf course, so sometimes I’ll go hit a bucket of balls at the driving range for an hour. It’s a fun break and it resets me, mentally. I actually just got a new set of clubs thanks to Evident’s personal development budget.
1 – 4pm – If it’s a quiet day, this is where core development happens. I turn off Slack so I can get into a nice flow and just dive into code. If I have afternoon meetings, sometimes they’re ad hoc when something pops up, and I’ll jump on with another engineer so we can run ideas past each other. Now that we’re remote-first, we can’t just swing by someone’s desk to chat like we used to, but luckily my team has been really open to joining a short video chat if we need to address an issue quickly.
I like to have one-on-one meetings to make sure we’re all synchronized, so I slot those in in the early afternoon, post-lunch. Everyone’s in a bit of a lull at this point, so this can be a good time to catch up with the engineering team to see what they’re working on, determine if there’s overlap, and try to keep the relationship open as well as formal.
4 – 6pm – My day is a bit of a freestyle from here on out. I’m usually done with my set meetings, and my afternoons are a great combination of getting work done and doing personal stuff. I do some of my best coding between 4 and 6pm, but if I’m not feeling it, I’ll push it off later and do something else. (e.g. I got a haircut at 4pm yesterday to beat some Atlanta traffic, and it was so much easier than trying to do it after hours!)
7 – 8pm – We eat dinner at 8pm sharp, every night. My fiancée usually cooks – that’s been her main hobby lately. She’ll get off work and go to town on making a delicious meal, so I’ll avoid the kitchen during this time and try to keep it busy til dinner is served. I’ll go hit some golf balls (if I haven’t already), maybe run a quick errand at Home Depot to buy a few new house plants, maybe do a little Peloton ride, finish up, shower, and then roll into dinner at 7:58. All in a day’s work.