Today marks my tenth anniversary at NETCONOMY 🥳 Back in 2009, when I joined the company, we were only 30 people in a single location in a small but beautiful building at the crossroad of Lange Gasse and Körösistraße in Graz. While I was absolutely enjoying it here, it was also my first job after graduating from University of Klagenfurt. I didn’t know what to expect from my life as full-time employee but I somehow had the feeling that I would probably move on after a couple of years. I saw it with pretty much everyone I looked up to in the Python community. Work would eventually become boring and I’d want to look for something different.
Somehow that never happened. Sure, there were some times when I was thinking really hard about working somewhere else on some other problems, but life never got boring. I eventually moved away from backend development into a newly formed team for mobile frontends for our shops and then, together with my mentor from 2009, we created a new team for internal tools and automation (with the name-by-meeting name “TAA”). What makes working at NETCONOMY special, is that if you see something that could be improved and are willing to work on it, everyone from all levels including CEO and CTO will help you. You just have to ask. Not much ceremony around that.
The same is true for when you want to try something new. Back when we founded TAA, I had been working on some internal automation tools in my spare-time but was running out of steam. So we sat together with our CTO where we proposed a department focused around internal tooling that would offer basically a development team taking requirements from departments as diverse as our customer support & services and project analysts. I could even have lots of fun with Go in real-world environments despite the company being primarily focused on Java development.
A couple of months ago, I once again felt the need for some change. There were some quite interesting offers on my plate but my girlfriend convinced me that it would make sense to eventually from being an individual contributor (no matter how experienced) and into a multiplier role where I could share my experience across multiple projects and development teams. While we are still fine-tuning some aspects of my new role, just having this option is a testament to how much effort and flexibility Netconomy is willing to put into every employee. Sure, sometimes things take a bit longer but after 10 years I still feel not done at this place that by now has three locations Graz (where we also have our headquarters), Vienna, Zurich, Berlin, Dortmund, as well as Belgrad, Madrid and others through joint-ventures.
I want to thank everyone NETCONOMY and especially my former and current team mates as well as our CTO for great 10 years. The team-atmosphere is what made and still makes NETCONOMY special and I’m looking forward to a bit more time with all of you 🙂
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