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Today, it is exactly twenty years ago since I started my job as a consultant for Trivadis. In 1999, I never thought that I will stay in one company for such a long time. A retrospective of the last two decades.
On 1st March 1999, a Monday morning, was my first working day for Trivadis. In the office in Glattbrugg near Zurich – not far away from where our office is today – I got a brand new laptop and a short introduction about the most important administration tasks. Then we went for lunch with my first customer, and in the afternoon, I was a Trivadis consultant, working for my first customer. Nobody talked about agility in IT at the end of the last century, but my on-boarding process at Trivadis was very agile.
For more than two years, I worked for this customer (an airline company) in the development team of a data warehouse, running on Oracle 8. My job was to develop load procedures with PL/SQL, and we were using cool new features such as partitioned tables and bitmap indexes. I was very proud to work on a database with the giant size of more than one terabyte!
Since these days, I worked in many other projects for more than 60 different customers, between one day and four years each. Usually, I work for multiple customers in parallel. In addition, I have the pleasure of giving courses for Trivadis Training from time to time. The Oracle trainings about SQL, PL/SQL, performance optimization, new features and data warehousing were (and still are) a good chance to learn and use many different database features – quite often more than we use in our daily jobs in customer projects.
Before I started to work for Trivadis, I changed my employer every few years. So what is the reason that I work now for the same company since two decades? The main reason is certainly the variety of works and projects I was allowed to do during this time. I still get bored if I work too long for the same project. But now I don’t have to leave the company, I just switch to another customer. Another reason is the company culture of Trivadis. I like the self-responsibility and flexibility of my job, the discussions and knowledge exchange with colleagues, and of course the regular TechEvents – our internal conference for technical knowhow sharing. In 1999, we had four(!) TechEvents a year. At this time, with around 100 employees, this was feasible. Now, “only” two TechEvents per year are organized. but of course they are much bigger and more professional than in the early years of Trivadis.
Not only the TechEvents are important for me, but also external conferences. The opportunity to speak at international conferences and user group events is another good reason that I like my job. Of course, there must be a good balance between earning money in customer projects and attend conferences. But every presentation on an external conference is a kind of self-promotion for Trivadis as well as for myself. Additionally, it is a pleasure to listen to other presentations and meet interesting people. My best year so far with regard to conferences was last year. I had the pleasure to present 14 sessions at 10 different conferences.
All this sound a little euphoric now. Unfortunately, there are also circumstances that are not so much fun. As in any job, there are sometimes boring tasks, tedious meetings or other unpleasant experiences. I even had two or three situations in the last 20 years where I was thinking about changing my job. But from the current point of view, I hope to stay for a few more year at Trivadis. Definitely not for another 20 years – for this, I am too old.
By the way: 2019 is really an anniversary year. The company Trivadis celebrates its 25th anniversary. I have the luck of living together with my wife Andrea for 30 years, and we are brewing beer in our microbrewery Monsterbräu since 10 years. But that’s another story…
