Evan Orie knows what it’s like to feel unsupported at work.

Early in his career, he landed a software developer role at a major tech company. Within a few days, it was clear that the culture wasn’t the right one for him. His team, which he says had a “work hard, play hard” ethos, operated at a breakneck pace. Often, this came at the expense of Evan’s growth. As someone early in his career, he had a lot of questions—many of which went unanswered.

“I didn't feel like I could contribute because there was no one helping me get to a place where I could speak up,” he recalls. “I felt like I was asking questions, reaching out for support, but just not getting anything back. Basically, I was told I wasn't at all a priority.”

Evan left the company four months later. Within a few weeks, he joined T. Rowe Price as a software developer—and everything changed. A resident expert in Adobe Experience Manager, Evan became the go-to source for colleagues who needed his help. And his colleagues returned the favor, helping Evan learn both new skills (such as Splunk, ReactJS, and AngularJS) and what it takes to thrive at T. Rowe Price.

“There are a lot of people here who are very willing to provide answers, or at least point you in the right direction. No problem feels insurmountable,” he said.

Creating a Culture of Continuous Learning

Evan’s early career experience is far from unique. In recent years, survey after survey has confirmed that lack of learning and professional development is one of the leading drivers of employee unhappiness at work. The ability to continuously learn is particularly important for technologists, whose work is both complex and constantly evolving. To do their jobs well, technologists know they need to understand and embrace the latest languages, frameworks, and ways of working.

Technologists at T. Rowe Price have taken this understanding to heart and have developed both formal and informal ways to help our teams get the skills they need to learn and grow. In the UK, for example, new associates are enrolled in our Software Developer Bootcamp, helping them both learn core engineering concepts and introducing them to T. Rowe Price’s development and deployment process. Associates around the world also have access to Code Club, a 10-week Python education course that matches students with experts eager to show them the ropes.

“This isn’t just a tech thing,” said Jon Cragg, co-head of our Developer Services group, which creates tools that help our developers deliver software faster and more efficiently. “We’re trying to get people across all our different functions to work together in new ways. It’s a way to explore switching career paths and open career mobility.”

Other technology learning efforts are less formal. Ask Trusty, for example, is an internal crowdsourced question-and-answer forum launched globally in 2021. Trusty is an internal nickname for the firm’s symbol, the bighorn sheep. Modeled after Stack Overflow, it allows T. Rowe Price associates who are dealing with technical problems to seek out guidance from their colleagues. Associates across the firm have embraced the platform. As of this writing, T. Rowe Price associates have submitted 1,500 questions and 1,600 answers to Ask Trusty.

Kenny McEwan, the forum’s creator and a member of the Developer Services team, said that the platform’s popularity reflects a culture of people who want to help and teach colleagues. “We wanted to create a platform where developers could help developers. I'm constantly surprised by how much time and effort people put into answering questions,” he said. (Read more about the culture at T. Rowe Price.)

For early-career associates, a workplace culture that combines constant learning opportunities and tireless peer support is increasingly in demand. When Isabel Frank interned with T. Rowe Price as a junior in 2021, she only had a vague sense of what she wanted to do once she graduated. While she knew she wanted to work with data, she didn’t know exactly what kind of data or in what industry.

It was her internship that helped open her eyes. “I got to see that there were so many different types of data science projects going on, all at the same time, supporting so many different business units. It helped me see that this was a place that offered a lot of ways to learn,” said Isabel, who is now an associate data scientist in New York. Since joining T. Rowe Price, she’s explored how to use natural language models to monitor trends in earnings calls and used weather data to determine which companies are most vulnerable to natural disasters.

Embracing New Ways of Working

Over the past few years, the ways in which developers build and deploy applications have changed in significant ways. Sparked by the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure, more technology organizations have embraced DevOps, an approach to application development defined by faster deployment, more automation, and fewer silos between software developers and operations teams.

T. Rowe Price has gone through its own DevOps journey, one led by Kenny and the rest of the Developer Services group. While such culture shifts are often extremely challenging to pull off, the team recognized it was an important one, as it will allow our teams to serve our clients more quickly and efficiently. “I think any organization that doesn't embrace DevOps is probably going to fall behind, and that's not something you can really afford to do nowadays,” said Kenny.

This shift is also driven in part by the needs and expectations of technologists, who view DevOps cultures as a nonnegotiable when considering potential employers. Developers who don’t have DevOps skills increasingly want them, and developers who have worked in DevOps cultures are often reluctant to leave them. Many candidates explicitly ask about T. Rowe Price’s DevOps culture when interviewing for roles at the firm, Kenny noted.

For more veteran technologists, the adoption of DevOps and other new technologies is a familiar pattern. “Something I’ve learned from older developers is that there’s always a learning curve when you go from a young professional to a seasoned veteran,” said Evan.

“You learn a lot at first, but then you reach an apex where you feel like you’re the best at everything,” he added. “But it’s not really a plateau because there’s always something new that comes out. I try not to be cynical or get overwhelmed by the pace of change because I know nothing ever stays the same.”

Learn more about technology careers at T. Rowe Price and explore career opportunities with us.