Having made the leap from a consultant to a Senior Developer, Nina Niskanen appreciates OP’s agile work culture, which constantly seeks to do things better.

“I’ve been interested in computers since I was a child – I got my first computer at the age of 11, and I was immediately fascinated by it. Ever since, working as a developer has been a natural career path for me. My career at OP started after I was working with OP’s customer relationship as a consultant. My decision to take the leap from being a consultant and to join OP was motivated by the work culture more than anything else. Our team is very interested in always doing things better. Our development work is going well, but everyone on the team still wants to keep developing our work further and further. That’s a feeling that I’ve been looking for my whole career, so it was an easy choice for me.

The transition has also provided me with a new kind of freedom in my work. Here, I always get to broadly develop my competences according to my own interests, which was another reason I knew that OP would be the right place for me. It was great to see that reality also matched my expectations – thanks to the 70:20:10 model we use, I’ve had more time and space to learn new things that aren’t immediately relevant to my daily work.

Development work focusing on varied technologies

You can see my work in the daily life of customers in several ways. Our team develops customer data services which can be used in different user interfaces. As such, you can see our work almost any time a customer or other user is managing customer data. We use a varied set of technologies that we are always working with. That’s why we benefit from skills other than just Java programming.

Problem-solving skills and a certain kind of persistence are useful in our work, because we also do a lot of user support and solve issues in the production and test environments of different applications. In other words, we are the layer between the user interface and several different databases, and we need to be able to communicate to the right people about them.

During the last year, we’ve had a lot of interesting projects – for example, with data security. It’s been great to participate in processes in which we develop applications to improve their data security and ensure that customer data is secure. In terms of data security, we will be seeing increasingly large leaps in all industries due to the changing situation in the world, and I’m watching this development with interest.

Time to train and learn new things

I’ve been very happy to get to work with so many highly skilled people. I think I made the right choice. Working with people who are this ambitious and skilled has been great. In my career, I’ve also encountered developers who are pretty fed up with their jobs, and I haven’t seen any here yet. Software Academy has also offered me new networking opportunities, as the academy courses have allowed me to get to know new people in the company that I might not otherwise meet.

The greatest feelings of success during this year have been the moments when I’ve finally started to crack a difficult problem. It’s a great feeling when you solve a problem you’ve been working at for a long time. Another success I’d like to mention is our work with the CI/CD pipelines – getting these systems into production has been a big accomplishment.

The future for the development field at OP looks bright to me. In addition to focusing on data security, we’ve started paying more attention to the developer experience and its implementation. Especially work under the 70:20:10 model is very nicely visible in my daily life, and I appreciate that we have set real goals for it. They ensure that everyone has the time for training and learning new things. One example of the time set aside for the continuous improvement of work is the innovation ticket system, which we can use to make development suggestions for our work. These are things I don’t remember seeing anywhere else. In my opinion, a shared intention to improve is very significant.”