Employees View

Employees View

Inspiration, team spirit & flexibility

Interview with Anja

How long have you been working at Qoniac? I joined the company in September 2015.

What are you working on at Qoniac right now? In the area of test analysis, I deal with very technical things like data import and licensing models. This gives me a very large range of tasks. Also my technical background in test automation also enables me to read the code and understand the technical data. Through this variety of tasks, I think I can help Qoniac quite well. 😊

What technologies are you most involved with right now? I deal with the internally built data report, try to understand it and make it accessible to others. I also attempt to simplify the internal processes in this regard.
In the slack time, I work on our TestBooster to develop and improve it.
In addition, I have attended the international testing conference Eurostar for the last three years. There I like gathering new ways of thinking, approaches and methods in the software testing field. Together as a team, we then discuss the ideas we have brought home and decide whether we want to pursue them further.

What do you like about working at Qoniac? I appreciate the diversity in my field of work and the chance of getting a taste of different areas. And also that you will get assistance from anybody at any time when you might get stuck. Looking at it on a larger scale, I feel it is great that we often get good feedback from a satisfied customer, for example, after launching our new release version. That motivates me again and again, as I’m sure this is not commonly the case everywhere in this industry.

What else should applicants know about Qoniac? They should not feel discouraged by the complexity of the tasks and the job domain. It takes a while to familiarize yourself. It’s worth it! Because you’ll be rewarded by internal feedback from your workmates but also from indirect external feedback from customers.

Interview with Nathan

How would you describe your professional development at Qoniac? What I like about Qoniac is that the company and the management are always interested in how you want to develop. And so, for myself and for my colleagues, they always take into account what your personal aims are. For me personally, it has been a very positive growth. I started in January 2018 as a Scrum Master, then I became a Product Owner and am currently a Manager.

What do you like about working at Qoniac? People are always open to conversation. You may not agree with every decision that is made, but you have the feeling that you are listened to and taken seriously.
Besides, I feel that a lot of different initiatives are going on, that caters for a lot of interests.
This coupled with being a fast-growing company, means we are always looking for ways to improve and getting people involved.

What is the advantage of agile software development for you? You can focus on what the customer wants. You have cross-functional teams, and teams are self-organized. That means that people feel much more empowered to do their work and get greater satisfaction from their work.
Also, we can deliver quickly internally to our engineers, so we get quick feedback and we are able to improve continuously. And people feel like they are actively being part of the development of the product, bringing their own ideas. We are lucky that all the teams enjoy working with each other and listening to each other. This, I believe, is very helpful in any software development environment.

How would you describe Qoniac’s corporate culture in a few words? Qoniac nurtures a very strong open-door culture. People are always ready to talk with each other and help one another.
It is also a very family-friendly culture. It seems that the majority of people working here have a family. The company is very considerate of colleagues in terms of flexible working hours and payments for daycare costs. The company itself feels a bit like a family, for instance we celebrate birthdays and successes together or people like bringing cakes for each other.
The culture is at a point of change at the moment, due to the merge with another company and our internal growth, however, I hope that we can continue in a positive direction and it certainly seems that way.

Interview with Maria

How long have you been working at Qoniac? I am part of the Qoniac team since September 2017.

How would you describe your job in three short sentences? I am the first contact at Qoniac for visitors, applicants and all other external guests and, together with my colleague Jeannette, we make up the welcome committee. 😊
I also make sure that everyday office life runs smoothly with everything that goes with it and that the employees are equipped with office supplies, fruit baskets, tea, coffee, and things like that.
This also includes the organization of the beloved local team events, including the famous ‘Oktoberfest’ for our annual trade show in San Jose, California.

You have a family – how well can you combine job and family? At Qoniac it is comfortable to combine job and family. Many of our employees have small children and the understanding of unforeseen circumstances (what can happen with small children) is great. You can see that Qoniac is family-friendly in a lot of things just as the New Year’s reception with a great kids’ program, to which all our employees’ families are invited that I am also organizing.
Just let me add, that my child would love to work at Qoniac in the future – what greater compliment could there be?

What do you enjoy most about your job? One of my favorite tasks is organizing little timeouts for our employees like our summer and winter events, Qoniac celebrations or running events. I really enjoy the spirit of togetherness. When I go to work, it doesn`t feel like “I have to”, it’s rather like “I want to”!

What advice would you give to potential applicants? Be yourself! Be authentic and don’t pretend to be someone else in the interview.
Even during the application process, it’s important to us that we treat everyone equally and we expect the same from potential new employees. For me, respectful and polite interaction with each other is the foundation of a relaxed working atmosphere.

Interview with Daniel

What are your responsibilities at Qoniac? I started at Qoniac as a Software Developer. In the meantime, I have also become responsible for Requirements Engineering tasks. In this role, I take new requirements from the application engineers – who are our semiconductor experts and internal customers – and other departments. Afterwards I formulate these requirements so that the software developers know what they need to implement. In other words, I act as a link between our software developers and the application engineers. Apart from that, I make myself available to the software developers during development to clarify detailed issues or have talks with the stakeholders.
I have also been Product Owner for the Research & Development Team for three months now, which involves additional jobs, such as iteration planning for our team: what tasks we want to work on in iteration, task prioritization, the ranking of topics in the backlog and preparation of tasks for team members. And, of course, I also do what I was originally hired for – develop software 😉.

What technologies are you most occupied with right now? Before I joined the Research & Development Team, I mainly worked with WPF, WCF and of course C#/.NET. At the moment, I’m primarily using .NET Core, Asp.NET Core. And I’m working with reactJS because I’m currently doing a slack time project with another developer. Since our software OVALiS should be raised to the next level, our main task in the team is to change the software from the previous .NET Framework to .NET Core. This is very challenging, but exciting at the same time.

Does Qoniac also provide leeway to learn about new technologies? Yes, definitely. Just as last year, there will be a two-day hackathon this year again when we are released from the usual development tasks for Ovalis. For that purpose, we are going to collect ideas and topics in advance and make them available on the website. After that everyone can choose their favorite subject so teams can get together and implement things or deal intensively with other software development topics. In the past, we could use a lot of these outcomes for our daily business.
I also want to mention that we are also very much encouraged to pick out conferences and training courses which we would like to attend. In the last years, I participated in several trainings and conferences paid by Qoniac.

What do you like about working at Qoniac? In the first place, my colleagues! It’s always a great pleasure to come to work and see my colleagues again. We are a very international team with more than ten nationalities and different professional backgrounds. This diversity is very exciting. I love it.
I also enjoy explaining things and transferring knowledge to my colleagues. I am happy to see that my work and new features bring added value and when this is noticed and appreciated by our application engineers – and that happens quite frequently at Qoniac. 😊

You have a family – how well can you combine job and family?
Qoniac offers flexible working hours coupled with a very humane core working time from 9:45 AM to 3:00 PM. This gives me huge flexibility. I often start working at 7:00 AM and leave the office at 3:00 PM.
Due to the current corona situation, I have the possibility to work outside the Qoniac office, preferably from home. All of us have laptops and a good VPN connection enabling us to work flexibly. Working from home saves me 90 minutes of commuting – additional time to spend with my family.

Interview with Stefan

Why were you convinced of Qoniac as an employer?  As far as I am concerned, there is a personal story behind it.
I wanted to get out of where I came from and see something new – a somewhat self-challenging thought. And then it was important for me to find a new employer, where I could bring in my skills and my strengths on the one hand and learn new things on the other. As I walked out of the interview, I thought that it would be a very good win-win situation for Qoniac and me personally if they decided to work with me. They had shown me the opportunity to further deepen the things I wanted to develop myself into. For one thing, this was professional software development and, for the other, working in an agile context with agile working methods, especially with Scrum.

I also was convinced by the mix of both sophisticated and challenging tasks, the way Qoniac’s management leads the company, the way the team spirit is conceived, how the company sees itself as a family and by the good development prospects for me.

How was your onboarding and your phasing-in? On my first day of work, I was shown around the office and introduced to my colleagues and my two mentors. I also received my configured notebook and got a first technical overview of systems and relevant software. After that the mentors then explained the first steps to me and presented the familiarization plan. If you had any questions, you could always contact your mentors, but also all other employees. It was a good mix during phasing-in – you were taught contents, but also had to work on things yourself and did not get everything bluntly presented on a silver tray.

How do you feel in Dresden? Indeed, I was in Dresden for the first time for my job interview. I then stayed here one more day to see the city as well. In the morning, I had the interview at Qoniac. In the afternoon, I looked at the old town and, in the evening, I wandered through the new town with its bars. I met nice people on that first evening. So, I was welcomed very open-heartedly and thought to myself, ‘Job fits and city fits, too.’
As I started working in the fall and got to know the Dresden club culture. Additionally, I enjoyed visiting the Christmas markets in December. But Dresden and its surroundings also have beautiful nature to offer – the Elbe river, the Dresden Heide and also Saxon Switzerland have inspired me very much.

How – as a mathematician – can you become involved with Qoniac and contribute effectively? What I personally realized – and you may not believe it at first glance –, but mathematicians can be a very differentiated breed. And there are various mathematical fields for a mathematician to dive into at Qoniac. Along with this, there are the personal strengths of the individual. As for myself, at Qoniac I have focused on contributing to topics that need a lot of communication between the different departments. In doing so, I have relied on my comprehension skills to process new requests very quickly. I also try to transfer the knowledge I have acquired from colleagues. As a requirement engineer and product owner, you have to communicate a lot between software developers and application engineers. Because sometimes they don’t speak the same technical language and you have to do some translation work to make meetings effective.

Many Qoniac employees report that they also meet with their colleagues outside working hours. Does this also apply to you? (Let’s take a look at the time before Corona.)
Yes, I occasionally meet up with some colleagues in my spare time, for example in the gym, or intentionally, for example, for an after-work beer, to party at the weekend or to do sports. I have noticed that many colleagues of mine are very keen on sports. This year we participated in the REWE Team Challenge as a company again. I was also there.