Working at Oliasoft

I studied MSc Engineering Cybernetics at the Norweigan University of Science and Technology. After graduating I worked with process control systems and related information management systems for six years.

I then switched direction and worked as a programmer and IT consultant in different projects both in private and public sectors for five years, before starting at Oliasoft in 2018.

Why did you choose to work at Oliasoft?

I think I was ready for something new, and after having been employed at larger companies, doing projects for other customers and clients, it sounded interesting to try a startup making and maintaining our own products. Also, with my mixed background of both industrial and process, and enterprise IT it sounded like a good fit for me to combine those two areas again.

What do you do at Oliasoft?

I am working as a developer, and in Oliasoft that means working a lot with JavaScript code. I also like to get involved in more DevOps related things, so for me it also involves quite a bit of work on getting our apps, services, databases and stores play well together, mainly in Azure and Kubernetes.

What does a normal workday look like for you?

It is a varied mix of trying to understand some heavy domain calculations in one moment, making sure it all will scale and run efficiently in the next, and then enabling the users to interact with these calculations in user friendly and snappy interfaces.

As we are onboarding more and more users and testers, I also spend some time following up their feedback. I collaborate with colleagues, external users and customers through internal chat systems, web meetings, and over merge requests and task/bug ticket discussions, and by just sparring and discussing things by the whiteboards in our offices. There are fewer emails and planned meetings than I am used to from previous jobs.

What makes you go to work every day?

I enjoy making things work: creating things that didn’t exist, improving things that were cumbersome, and fixing things that are broken. This applies to many developers I think. At Oliasoft we have a special feeling of ownership as we are making our own applications, and we are making something new, which means starting off with a clean sheet, getting a lot of room for influencing how we do things in good ways.

We are working with quite complex and challenging things, and having experts around me that are digging into and really understanding the different aspects of these, be it maths, physics, UX, system architecture or economics of it, and then seeing that we can make it work, is motivating.

In your opinion, why should people work here?

It is interesting to see and be a part of how something starts from scratch and grows up to something new and valuable. And this is a good place to be if you enjoy having your brain hurt a little every day (I do!), having to learn quite a few new things every day to be able to solve your tasks, working together with colleagues that care about the domain and the product we are making, while having the freedom to choose a lot of the tools and components we are using