A Seat on a Rocketship Instead of a Job? A Recent Grad’s Groq Experience.

Written by Hatice Ozen

We’ve all seen the movies (or lived the reality) of the new employee deemed as not having “enough experience” and tasked with coffee runs or - worse - mind-numbingly boring and impactless work. Queue the scenes of incessantly staring at the clock - time seems to halt when you’re disengaged. 

Well, I joined a startup this last January with the exact opposite environment, even for an industry newbie like me–time at Groq is flying (dare I say at the speed of our GroqChip™ processors) and I can honestly say that the excitement since joining has not let up for even a moment. 

I wanted to take a moment out of my day to reflect on my journey aboard the Groq-et Ship so far. Unlike a lot of my peers here, I don’t come from a hardware or semiconductor or [insert impressive background here] background. In fact, I’m a recent grad and had little more than a year of software engineering experience under my belt at the time I joined. Pair this with the huge emphasis Groq has on talent density and you’d think it would be the recipe for a whole lot of imposter syndrome. Wrong. 

My excitement to log into work each day from wherever I please, be it my home office or local coffee shops, comes from the unique culture that exists here. What I thought would be a race to catch up to my colleagues’ decades of experience is more like a marathon on a scenic route decorated with machine learning, math, semiconductors, hardware, electronics, memes, and so much more. Instead of being judged on my limited experience, I’m lauded for my potential and trusted with impactful (and dare I say fun) projects paired with support from my team.

Speaking of team, the teamwork here is incredible. Everyone has the passion and patience to teach, and even be taught - my colleagues regularly let me know what they learn from me. Coming into this job, I never thought this would be the case, but that’s the beauty of my team at Groq. No inflated egos. Micromanaging is nonexistent. Trust is rampant. 

In just five months, I’ve gathered a sizable array of projects under my belt and what feels like years of learnings from some of the most intelligent, and surprisingly humble, people I have ever met. My team is, essentially, the bridge between engineering, product, and our valued customers - not only are we the internal voice for the customer and their journey, but the translators that transform engineer-speak into consumable content. I work daily with our engineering teams to enable customer releases and drive the creation of collateral, which ranges from software application tutorials to guides for various components of our software and hardware.

One recent project I was entrusted to own from start to finish was our RealScale™ Chip-to-chip User Guide. It was an opportunity to work with dozens of engineers and others to create an easy-to-use knowledge source that customers could tap into. The best part? There’s no shortage of these kinds of growth opportunities at Groq. 

Now that we’ve established why time flies by here at Groq and that there are no coffee runs in my future here, I'm going to get back to tinkering with an API example that I’ll be publishing to our customers and sending memes to my team's Slack channel. 

Interested in an experience like I’ve had here at Groq? Check out our open positions at groq.com/careers.