Starting a new adventure

After 5 years spent working at Spacemetric, I finally decided to move on. The last years have been great and it's insane how much I grew. But I also think it's important to move when you start feeling too comfortable somewhere. That's what allows you to keep growing. So I started working at ING in the beginning of May.

I have always worked in small companies and never expected to take a position such a large organization. And on top of it, this new job marks the stop of my work in the GIS / imagery processing industry.

Over the last years, I grew more and more interest in leading people. I always loved fixing problems and communicating with others. During the last years at Spacemetric, I have spent a lot of efforts trying to get people to embrace new ways of working, getting them to go to events, testing new technologies, . . .
At the same time, I love finding win/win solutions to real-life daily issues, especially if that involves customers. As such, I knew that I was searching for a Team lead position. I hate the word management, but I definitely believe in leading from the inside out. So I wanted to find a place where I could keep building stuff, while also providing value at a higher level.

I still do like image processing a lot, but the market is not that big and finding a team that needs a lead, in the Image Processing industry, in the Netherlands was a bit too restrictive. I decided to drop the Image Processing requirement :), and keep it for side projects.

One day, I found a Chapter Lead position description at ING. I didn't know what a Chapter Lead, but it looked exactly like who I was!
Being part of the team and actually coding for half of your time, while being responsible for a specific area of expertise. The best of all worlds!

Working such a huge company is very new and different for me. Some things are very frustrating. The technical limitations make it difficult to feel productive (slower network, security process, laptops install restrictions, slower deployment process, ...). But on the other hand, there are major advantages: High budget to go on conferences, a very large knowledge database, mandate to try crazy experiments / proofs of concept, ....
And the Agile setup stil allows you to have the startup feeling (my team is 10 peope big, with engineers and business sitting together). Finally, the good side of large companies is that it is much easier to meet very inspiring people often, from very various backgrounds.

So far I'm very happy of my choice. It is possible that there will be a point where I want to go back to a small company again. But for the moment, I am learning a lot every day and I am growing; and I also feel like I bring to the team so it's all good.

Cheers,