This post is by two of our newest team members, Manuel and Lluís, sharing their experience of starting at Northern.tech
Hallo, Hallo mein Name ist Manuel. Hola! Me llamo Lluís. New year, new job is what they always say and after having been in Berlin for too long I joined Northern.tech right at the beginning of this year. I am also a new arrival in the Northern.tech group; originally from Spain, I moved to Norway about seven years ago seeking for new challenges. During these three months, I have not looked back, not for a single second. The application process was a breeze, the feedback and advice that I got was honest and very helpful. From all the challenges I have faced so far, joining Northern.tech has been the most exciting one.
Coming in with a split personality where one half is what is generally known as a fullstack developer and the other half a software & innovation consultant, I currently focus mostly on the frontend of Mender.
And as for me, I am an embedded software engineer and IoT maker enthusiast. Coming from the electronics and integrated circuits industry, I joined the Mender team to focus on client side and QA related work.
As you would expect from a modern company, hierarchies are flat, you can take ownership and the development happens in an agile process. The extent to which these things happen are however a little different here and that might be most notably in the combination of flat hierarchies and taking ownership. Everyone is free to address obstacles they see and change whatever helps to become a better organization. Of course there are guardrails, but even those can be changed if necessary. While you crawl through this blog, make sure to take a look at the company beliefs. They are accurate and the company culture at Northern.tech is, in our opinion, what companies should aspire to have.
Our first contact with the team was during the yearly summit. In Northern.tech we gather in some exotic mountain once a year where lots of discussions happen, where we can evaluate and improve the what and the how of our work. Together with sharing some good quality social time together, of course. So for us was hands-on business since day one! Here we got to actually experience how we share and discuss ideas all as equals, both for deciding what to do for lunch and what our next market goal should be.
People at work are autonomous and self-driven, but at the same time friendly and collaborative. We got the opportunity and encouragement to contribute to the technical discussions, the code base, and the process since the very beginning. Even though in our first PR we still had to rebase our commits with the proper signing and changelog tags, to satisfy Mr. Travis. And here is where the helpful nature of the team came into play.
We also acknowledged the high skilled people we are now working with, and how much care, quality and self-initiative they put in whatever we are doing at the moment. It is a dynamic workplace with a lot of talent to learn from and a vision to contribute to.
Manuel Zedel & Lluís Campos