Transitioning from working directly for a company, I moved on to working with customers at my job’s location and occasionally being on-site. Now, I’ve transitioned into consultancy. As of last month, I am a Senior Consultant at Devoteam’s M Cloud. I’m still building in C#, still using .NET, and still aiming for full-stack. Obviously, consultancy will mean that I will work on a variety of different projects, some short, some long, and the technology I use may vary.
Starting days
Still, no matter how many times you change jobs, it’s still a weird experience. You show up, have an internal training first day and then you get to work, right? Well, with consultancy, you first need to get a project. Which might take a couple of weeks.. Or in my case, I had a client next day. Not just any client, a breeder and researcher into vegetable seeds, operating in more than 30 countries with over 2200 employees. It took a while for me to actually get started. Getting through documentation, going through the flowcharts, getting permissions, etc. But eventually I got to work on their integrations, helping their internal development team, refactoring and also building new Azure Functions. The challenge with integrations always is the dependency on the other systems.
Obviously, we have some issues
Close to testing day, we discovered that if a new item was added but not published, the system would send out a new event. This new event would trigger a function to get the data so it could be pushed to the target system. The problem here is that the item is not published, so it can’t be fetched yet. When the item was published, it would send out an update event, which meant we would get the item (which now succeeded), and try to update the record in the target system, which failed since it didn’t have the item. So, changes have to be made in the source system.
Next assignment
What was supposed to be a job for about a month got extended to 2 months, then 2.5 months, but now it seems like it might be coming to a close sooner than that.
This means that we’re already looking for another assignment. So I’ve applied to 1 assignment, which also would mean going to the client wouldn’t take close to 2.5 hours of travel, but instead would be close to me. Sadly, I didn’t get that assignment, we’ll see what happens next.
Perks of the job
In the meantime, we do have some good perks. Like many offices, there’s fresh fruit, but there often are snacks, like Indonesian Bakwan Jagung, Moroccan sweets, or Vietnamese spring rolls. The coffee here is also better than at any office I’ve worked at so far!
It seems like I joined at the right time. If I had joined a month later, I would’ve missed the great Korean BBQ we went to. Ironically, it was organized by the person who was, at the time, in Korea for a holiday. He was missed, but we had great food and even better colleagues there.
Outside of the team outing, we also have department bonding days. Last month’s bonding day was cancelled, but I do look forward to the knowledge sessions (and free food). Young Devoteam also organizes their own events, like a padel evening (ironically during the Korean BBQ).
Learning
At Devoteam there’s an emphasis on growth and learning. This was clear since even before I worked here, as in my third interview round it was made clear I’d have to get certified and keep up to date with relevant knowledge. In the first weeks, it was clear what my objectives would be in my first year and what was available to reach that. Since I also have a bit of fear of failure when it comes to exams, that was also talked about and reassured.
So what now?
While I have left previous jobs for various reasons, including feeling like the company didn’t care about me, being bored because I was on the same assignment for too long, I feel like this may not be the case in this consultancy role. So, onward we go!
