Culture Articles

We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.

SEP Wins TechPoint’s 2025 Exceptional Employer Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Tech Employer, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named Exceptional Employer by TechPoint at the 26th annual Mira Awards. This award recognizes companies that are developing talent through skills-based hiring…
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Why We Look for Professional Development When Hiring

Let’s start with a situation that’s familiar to me working with SEP as a recruiter. I’ve woken up at five-thirty in the morning so that I can make it to a college campus by seven-thirty. We expect our first student candidates to meet us at eight. We’re a bit early so we need to wait. […]
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4 Ways We Attract Great Interns

Finding top-notch people (engineers, designers, etc.) to work at SEP is a key thing we focus on each year. As part of finding and attracting great interns, it’s important to have a clear idea of what your company has to offer. Students will interact with lots of companies, often in quick succession. Knowing what you […]
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SEP Book Review & Recommendation for The Pragmatic Programmer

5 Books You Should Read Before You Start Your First Job In Software Engineering

Traditionally, students get only a small taste of the industry before graduating. You may find yourself chugging coffee at 3 am before a deadline; a hard lesson on project pacing. Perhaps you, a team leader, has to deal with a colleague upset about the balance of project work. Despite these experiences, you’ll surely be learning […]
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Why we invest so much in Professional Development

We are living in a technological renaissance.  It is a period of change only last seen between the fourteen and seventeenth centuries when Europe moved from the middle ages to modern times, leading into the industrial revolution.  The last twenty years  have led to unimaginable changes in the way we conduct our lives and our […]
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5 Steps to Create a Successful Internship Program

Thinking about starting an internship program at your company? Already have interns and don’t know what to do with them? Here are our best tips to make your internship program successful (and enjoyable!) for both parties. 1. Define Success A question we regularly ask ourselves here at SEP, whether we’re developing an app or planning […]
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SEP branded Rubix cube

5 Products Built During Our Hackathon That We Actually Used

When we run company hackathons we end up with quite a variety of ideas. The teams working on these projects always get something out of them regardless of whether the projects continue on past the weekend. We do have some projects that go further than fun over the weekend. These are the products that we […]
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What Really Matters

On November 1st, the project I had been working on for seven years ended. It was an incredibly rewarding professional and technical experience. I learned what it was like to integrate into a large company and dozens of other development teams. I worked in technologies I had never worked in before, and on a code […]
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How We Run Company Hackathons

We’ve been running hackathons at SEP since 2011. Over the years we’ve experimented with the setup. It’s ranged from actual product pitches to technology explorations (and everything in between). Recent hackathons have settled into a pattern that works well for us. That pattern includes: Pitches Q & A Form teams Build Demos Our hackathons run […]
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2019 Intern Experience

What was your favorite thing about this summer? “My favorite thing about this summer has been trying out such a wide variety of functions here at SEP.  To name a few, I have gained experience in user research, graphic design, and user experience.” -Laura Buckles “SEP did a great job at giving me a glimpse […]
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