Award nominations
Will Jang
Paciolan
Best Tech Manager Finalist
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How does this manager promote career growth?
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How does this manager ensure a great team culture?
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How does this manager inspire innovation?
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Does this manager employ a clear and communicated vision to produce a great product?
Will Jang is the Director of Engineering in Paciolan's API and Mobile platforms. He has worked to improve his teams' tech maturity by introducing lean and agile methodology and helps promotes efficiency and forward thinking across the engineering organization. He fosters a strong culture for continuous improvement via weekly one on one reviews with direct reports and is quick to work with them to expand their ideas. A recent hire had been running a Meetup for local developers and Will has worked with him to have Paciolan sponsor those events and host them in our break room with refreshments. This has given Will a great opportunity to encourage his team to learn new skills and think about their career aspirations while also benefiting the local engineering community. Will also uses these events as an opportunity to reach out to possible future applicants and interns and introduce the company to the local developer community and give them a taste of the company culture while giving current employees the opportunity to show off their expertise and learn new skills. This is one example of how Will focuses on helping his direct reports expand on their ideas, taking them to the next level and creating an opportunity that benefits everyone.
Will leads multiple teams and projects in daily Kanban stand-ups and works closely with product and program leads to provide clear delivery roadmap. By providing guidelines on engineering processes and making sure a consistent definition of done is met, Will makes sure to guide the architecture vision across multiple systems and build Microservices to ensure resilient systems. He has helped lead the API and Mobile engineering organizations to execute on high business value initiatives while moving the tech stack forward with a DevOps mindset, utilizing Serverless, AWS, and CI/CD in mind.
Will also works hard to mentor engineers in their career path by providing coaching and pairing both internally and outside the company. He works closely with UCI, a current Paciolan client, to run an internship program where students can come and get exposure to an office environment. He makes sure to create a valuable experience for these interns by involving them in projects and encouraging participation in the companywide DevJam. Additionally, he works with UCI on their on-going Capstone where teams of students work together to solve a variety of user experience challenges in nearly any domain by working with an external client over six-months. Iterative research, design, development, and evaluation are the keys to success in the capstone projects and Will encourages all of his students making sure they know their work has real world value by having them present to the whole company during our "All Hands" meeting.
Will works hard to inspire everyone to think about their career growth and finds ways to reach outside of their normal responsibilities to try something new or different and build on their current skills. In addition to all of his job responsibilities, Will has also taken a proactive role in helping keep all of our company social platforms updated and finding new ways to reach out and find recruiting opportunities. He has done a fantastic job representing the company and working to make sure that he is finding the most qualified talent and helping them meet their potential.
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Paciolan
Best Tech Workplace Diversity Finalist
Best Tech Workplace - Culture & Diversity Submission
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Does this company implement diverse hiring practices?
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Does this company promote collaboration and diverse thinking to produce an innovative product?
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Does this company provide the tools and resources to explore and celebrate differences?
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Does this company promote technical creativity?
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Does this company promote innovation?
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Does this company promote learning?
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Does this company reward contributions from the whole team?
Paciolan makes sure that balancing the mission of providing the best ticketing platform technology to collegiate sports programs, performing arts venues, professional sports teams and arenas, while super serving our clients with quality customer service and marketing support with having a great work life balance is an integral part of our company culture. Everyone is not only encouraged to innovate and make great product, but also to take advantage of all of the amenities that Paciolan provides, as well as making sure that employees take their vacation time and keep in mind their work-life balance.
The core PAC values are Passion, Accountability and Collaboration and are a clear indicator of what matters most to our leadership team. We review these values in our monthly All Hands meetings, where the entire company comes together to share successes and get company updates. During these All Hands meetings all our new hires are introduced, and employee promotions are announced and celebrated. We also use this opportunity to celebrate our employee retention by announcing employment anniversaries, with our CEO Kim Damron giving a special shout out to each employee whose tenure is over ten years. While we recruit heavily from universities and top tier talent, it is encouraging that employees stay +10, and even +20, years and really reinforces Paciolan’s commitment to help employees advance their careers within the company.
One of the ways that the company invests in its employees is by bringing in outside training and speakers on Javascript, CI/CD, AR/VR, sales and more to help expand employee skill sets in all our departments. We also now host and sponsor a series of regular Meetups that was started by an employee for the local developer community. During these meetups there is time for networking with refreshments, and then a presentation with a follow up Q&A. These give an opportunity for our employees to learn, display their expertise, and exposure to the local developer community for recruiting. Additionally, each year during our annual client conference PACnet where clients visit from all over the country to learn and network, our client facing employees are given an opportunity to present best practices and/or moderate panels.
Being located in the University of Irvine Research Park gives us easy access to see our platform in action at the UCI Athletics box office and collaborate with the engineering program. Taking advantage of the UCI Capstone projects, with both undergrad and graduate students who help to build applications using React Native and NodeJS, gives the students a real-world learning experience, creates additional bandwidth internally and gives our teams exposure to mentor. We also work with UCI on an undergraduate intern program with the engineering department, as well as the athletics marketing team supplying many of our marketing interns, many of which became full-time employees. Across Paciolan, we have employees from diverse background across the product engineering organization. We celebrate various cultural celebrations like Diwali and Asian American Heritage month. We also work closely with Women in Computer Science club from UCI to provide mentoring, shadowing and events to help teach and provide guidance to the next generation of engineers. This is how we make sure to display our PAC values of Passion, Accountability, and Collaboration.