How can you keep expanding your knowledge once you have chosen your specialization? That was an important question to me when I started looking for a new employer. As a Linux engineer, I want to know all the ins and outs of the Linux environment, but I don’t want to lock myself in a Linux silo and never look at other systems again. If you want to keep growing, you need to keep learning!
Two and a half years ago, I found the answer to my question at Solvinity. At the time, Solvinity was rapidly changing their teams: specialized departments were replaced by customer engineering teams. In the classic departments, engineers with similar skill sets were put together, whereas a customer engineering team consists of people with very diverse specializations. All departments used to work for the full set of clients, while nowadays each customer has its own customer engineering team.
This way of working greatly appeals to me. My own expertise gives me a very clear role and responsibility within my team, but at the same time, I’m surrounded by people with different skill sets that allow me to learn a lot. Even better, since we work for a smaller number of customers, there’s much more opportunity to dive deeper and really get to know the full stack of services. Having so much expertise in one team allows me to broaden my horizon and look beyond my own specialization. Every day I’m learning something new by working with people I might never have met outside Solvinity.
As Solvineers we’re also constantly challenged, simply because we’re invited to add our thoughts and expertise. Innovation is stimulated in all layers of the organization: if you have ideas, you can put them on the table, and if approved, you can develop them and help put them into practice. In order to keep ourselves up to date, we have access to our own e-learning environment where we have all sorts of training materials, so there are more ways to stimulate our personal development besides tapping into the expertise of our coworkers. We have short lines of communication and our management clearly puts a lot of trust the technical abilities of the staff.
Being involved with our clients also stimulates us to create new solutions. If a customer keeps asking us to do the same trick, and we think you can speed things up, we start looking for possibilities to automate. As a Solvineer, I’m the link between client and system management. Bringing them together in an automated environment is a real advantage, since it allows customers to manage a lot of things themselves without having to call us for support all the time. This is important, because our customers need more speed than ever before – it’s good to know that they can make their own changes, within the boundaries we’ve set for them.
Every Solvineer is a technician in heart and soul. If you enjoy doing great stuff on a large platform, for large customers that are really making waves in their market, Solvinity honestly is the place to be.
Dennis Storm is Linux Engineer at Solvinity
