Almost five years at Aviva Solutions and still enjoying it every minute

I know, I know, I’m still 3 months away from it. But without doubt, on the 1st of February, I will be celebrating my first 5-year anniversary in the 15 years of my professional career. That might sound silly, but I’ve always had a problem of getting restless after a few years . It never was a problem with the people around me, and in fact, from a employee point of view I’ve never had anything to complain at all. It has just been my desire to move along at some point and discover a fresh new environment.

Strangely enough I don’t have that problem at all currently. Some may claim its my age and the corresponding desire for finding a final settlement, but I’m quite sure it’s the uniqueness of my current employer, Aviva Solutions. I think this is well illustrated by this photo collage (click for a bigger picture).

Obviously our annual social trip to a warm place close to the beach is only barely sufficient to keep me happy (pun intended). But the fact that we have practically no hierarchy, that I enjoy the company of some very experienced colleagues, and that our two CEOs value each and every employee by heavily facilitating in their personal and technical knowledge and skills might be more important.

To clarify my added value to the company, I try to lead the themes Custom Solutions & ALM and Cloud Solutions. That means that I spend four days a week on (long-term) consultancy jobs and one day in making sure we as a company invest enough in current and new Microsoft technologies, practices and software development methodologies.

BTW, the other themes include Application Integration, E-Commerce & CMS, Business Intelligence and Portals & Collaboration. This doesn’t mean anybody is fixed to a particular theme for life. Its just to allow them to focus a bit and prevent them from drowning in the elaborate world of Microsoft. In fact, everybody is expected to have thorough knowledge of the .NET Framework and a clear understanding with the practices from Extreme Programming and Agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban.

We’re only with 40 professionals right now, and we’re still looking for new colleagues that match the following characteristics:

• Are passionate about the software development profession
• Like to share their opinions
• Are capable of conveying that opinion to the lesser gods (read: managers)
• Are not afraid to propose alternate or better solutions to a problem
• Have a natural tendency of trying to improve themselves and the people around them
• Speak Dutch fluently
• Who don’t have anything against an annual weekend at a warm sunny beach and a drink here and there

If you think you fit that description in any way, let me know by tweeting me at @ddoomen or emailing me at [email protected]. We might be drinking a beer at next year’s annual event.