LoyLap bridges the gap between bricks and mortar retail businesses and their customers. We work closely with businesses to establish loyalty, gift, rewards and alternative payment systems that digitally connect merchants to their customers and facilitates transaction management.
When faced with a challenging issue, employees are expected to propose more than one possible solution. Not only does this process stimulate the brain, but it eventually leads to creative solutions to challenging situations. We strongly believe that creativity feeds innovation and we would like to believe this is reflected in our product portfolio as well. We value creative thinking whether we’re evaluating a feature/app, making decisions that cost resources, or evaluating a potential hire. This is why we always ask candidates to tell us about a time when they overcame adversity against all odd, with very little resources in their favor. We value creative thinking and problem solving, and actively look for these attributes when interviewing prospective candidates.
What is LoyLap from LoyLap on Vimeo.
A lot of our ideas come from the drawing board. We have forums of discussion where employees share ideas with each other. These discussions cover a wide range of topics from product/feature discussions to current affairs and latest trends in technology. This public exchange of information has now become a valuable platform for our team as a collective to learn from each other and collaborate on different projects. In order for these discussions to be productive, everyone needs to be self-aware and able to self-manage themselves.
We encourage our employees to voice their ideas and opinions, but we absolutely do not tolerate yelling, aggression, racism, or sexism of any kind. We provide our employees a workplace with a nurturing and inclusive atmosphere.
For example, an intern was tasked with finding a solution to a problem caused by non-engineers in the company issuing clumsy updates. His solution ultimately became a popular internal tool for the company. That person currently works remotely for the company simply maintaining that tool. Every employee at LoyLap takes pride in they work they do and we as a company nurture our employees by providing the best possible support and resources to help them succeed in their endeavors.
Developers are not silos, they can have specialties but the “Bus Factor” (the ability of a company to continue performing despite employees getting hypothetically hit by a bus!), in Loylap needs to be quite high. The higher the Bus Factor, the higher the probability the company can continue to function.
Wearing many hats is important to the overall function of the company, but it also benefits individuals. If a you wear a few hats and a role becomes redundant due to a tech stack change or loss of big client, you can simply wear another hat. If we lose a person, there’s a good chance the institutional knowledge they had won't also be lost, because another member in the company has similar knowledge. While roles can become redundant, people never do.
One of our strengths is having an open and clear communication channel between different teams. The Technical and the Business teams are both just a stone's throw away from each other. We try to eat lunch together, and also have monthly team dinners so that we can bond with one another. While we do provide the facility of working remotely, we prefer working together as a team.
LoyLap is important, but our employees’ health and well being is far more important. There are times when you’ll just need a break to recharge and overcome your writer/programmer’s block. To us, part of having work/life balance means being able to say “no” to the company. We hope you’ll tell us when you need a break and then come back when you’re mentally refreshed and ready to go.
We’re also flexible in terms of when you work. On a typical work day at LoyLap, you might show up between 9am and 11am, work for a few hours, have lunch around 1pm (or eat lunch at 3pm if you’d like, no problem!), and then see out the remaining hours of the day. We encourage our employees to schedule their days to better pursue their personal interests beyond office hours. When you work matters less to us than working well.
Dublin has some great pubs to explore, so we make it a practice to go for a few beers on Fridays together. It’s a great way for us to wind down for the weekend and also lets us get to know each other personally.
People in LoyLap have different domains of expertise, so training means having someone able and willing to impart that knowledge. For example, an iOS dev expanding his domain may learn the Android SDK with the Android dev overseeing it. We also encourage our employees to make time and participate in community events. Some people attend a weekly programming book club, and we also have members participate in activities like five-a-side football. We celebrate the interests of our employees and hope to continue this culture of development both inside and outside of the workplace.
Our technical and commercial teams work together with the common objective to improve our products. Since we have now evolved into a Fin Tech company with aspects of Customer Transaction Management, it is vital for the Business team to be in absolute sync with the Technical Team. We achieve this by trying to keep everyone on the same page with regular meetings. We have two dev meetings a week, one business meeting each week, and a full team meeting once a month. As an engineer, you will work alongside your engineering peers as well as members in other departments.
The EU stipulates mandatory holidays of 20 paid days per year. We feel this is an appropriate number. Personal days or sick days are different and are dealt with on a case by case basis -- vacations are planned in advance.
We use a LAMP (Linux (Ubuntu), Apache, MySQL, PHP) and have iOS and Android clients that we developer natively in Swift and Kotlin. We also integrate with the Clover POS terminals. We’re infinitely curious so we also dabble in lots of other tech but this is our official stack.
Interviews can last from 30-60 minutes, and the founders are typically responsible for this process. Candidates are encouraged to be comfortable and candid –– there is no whiteboard coding. Candidates ability to program is judged from their GitHub portfolio and inferred from other factors like the coherency of concepts discussed in their interview and listed work experience. We don’t feel code produced under pressure is an effective reflection of the individual's ability in our work environment.