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. 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.
For the last three years, I have attended the international testing conference Eurostar where 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’ll 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. It’s worth it! You’ll be rewarded by internal feedback from your workmates but also from indirect external feedback from clients.

Interview with Nathan

How would you describe your professional development at Qoniac? What I like about Qoniac is that the company and the management is 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 postive 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.
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.
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, 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 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.
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.

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.
I am also responsible for 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.
We have a parent-child room, so I don’t necessarily have to take a day off when the day care center is closed, and you have no one to look after your child.
Every year we have a New Year’s reception with a great kids’ program, to which all our employees’ families are invited.
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 (e.g. 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, a 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 (our semiconductor experts) and other departments and 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 detail issues or have talks with the stakeholders.
I’ve also been Product Owner for the Research & Development Team for three month 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 like last year, there will be a two-day hackathon this year again when we are released from usual development tasks for Ovalis. For that purpose, we’re going to collect ideas and topics in advance and make them available on the website. In the end, everyone can choose their favorite subject, the teams will 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.
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 (more than ten nationalities) with 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 (9:45 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.). This gives me huge flexibility. I often start working at 7:00 a.m. and leave the office at 3:00 p.m.
Due to the current corona situation, I have the possibility to work outside the Qoniac office, e.g. from home. All of us have laptops and good VPN connection enabling us to work flexibly. When I work from home, this saves me 90 minutes of driving time every day – additional time to spend with my family.

Interview with Mr. Kim

Could you please introduce yourself in three words? NOT-BORING-GUY

What was your motivation to join Qoniac? I’ve worked for semiconductor business, especially lithography area, for 6 years. The news from several technical papers and people in various sites were so attractive to me. ‘There is one great software, which is multi capable to use it for almost every use case we need.’ Because my responsibility of job was to analyze the data and to find a problem from unclear, insufficient and tremendous data, I’ve always thought how it looks like.

What is your responsibility in the company? My responsibility is ‘process engineer’. Based on my experience in previous carrier, I want to initiate the new function in OVALIS and to make customized, optimized functions from customer’s demands. And I’ll be involved in all development process and customer support.

What did you personally expect from your job? Challenging opportunity, creative work, real team and fun.

How is Qoniac supporting you to develop new skills? Everyone in Qoniac is supporting me that I can be one of Qoniac. I got great instruction program from my colleagues regarding our product and business as well as life in Qoniac. In fact, I am not familiar with software development process but my colleagues keep giving me chances to learn it.

What do you appreciate about Qoniac? Because I moved from South Korea, I had so many difficulties to relocate. Since Qoniac supported me to have soft-land here, however, I can move to here Dresden successfully. I really appreciate it.