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What is it like to work at Anders Innovations, Frank Wickström

29.05.2018 | Mika Räsänen | Read time 8 min
Frank has worked at Anders for 1,5 years. He studied computer science at Åbo Akademi and after his studies worked as a web developer in a startup company for a few years. One day while he was roaming the streets of Turku, he saw Anders’ logo on a building. Frank decided to find some more information about Anders Innovations. “I checked Anders up online and it seemed like a great fit since they were working with everything that I was interested in. So I applied and here I am.” Frank started as a Developer, but he was soon promoted to Senior Developer. “We noticed quite quickly that this would be a better fit since I wanted to do more than develop. I wanted to have more interaction with the customers and be part in building the company.”

Developing by the rivers of Aura

Frank’s main focus is still in developing and creating software for Anders’ customers. On top of that, Frank does some project management and he is also a part of strategy and innovation groups, that are pushing the company forward. Some people like status quo and don’t appreciate change, but Frank enjoys the constant change in a fast-growing company. “I’d rather test something new all the time than just try to keep everything the same and hope for the best.”

There are already 50 people working at Anders. Even though it’s not a small company anymore, change can still happen quite fast when there’s a need for it. “I was used to having almost no hierarchy in my previous job and it’s fairly similar here. I don’t really like bureaucracy and when that is kept to a minimum, I’m happy.”


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Embrace the change

Frank has worked for 5 years in web developing. During that time the change in the scene and in the technologies has been fast. “It’s a good and a bad thing. You have to keep up with it and learn new things, which I like, but the bad part is that you can’t ever become an expert since there’s always the next thing coming up.” Still, for Frank, the constant learning isn’t frustrating because he enjoys learning new things. “That’s one of the reasons why I became a developer. I like learning new things and I don’t want to stop learning and do the same thing over and over again.” If the person wants to learn, they’ll definitely have that opportunity at Anders where people get two hours every week that they can use freely to develop their skills and learn new stuff.

“Transparency is one of our core values”

“The main thing I like is that we aim to be open and transparent both to our customers and to our employees”, Frank says. Anders keeps a tight connection with their customers and most of the time the developers are directly in contact with customers. Anders keeps things as realistic as possible and if something is wrong or not possible, they are willing to say it to the customer with no need to sugarcoat it. Internally this openness means, that when you give feedback about something that isn’t working, there will be a quick change. You don’t have to nag about things for several years and become frustrated. “If there is an issue we can openly talk about it and then it gets resolved straight away”, Frank tells. By doing so, there are fewer conflicts. “The people here are open and friendly to each other. I haven’t seen any conflicts which I found really weird but it’s a sign of a good work environment”, he adds.

Anders is actively pushing to get as much diversity to their employees as possible. There has been a lot of talk in the media about the lack of women in the developer-scene. Anders has tried it’s best to change this situation e.g. with workshops and giving information about the industry to these focus groups. Diversity is important especially in the line of software developing. When people with different backgrounds and personalities put their heads together to solve a problem, those different viewpoints could make up something quite innovative. Anders luckily has employees from all around the world. In the midst of English, you can hear at least Finnish and Swedish of course but also Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Romanian and even Urdu and Hindi.


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What will the future bring?

Now there are a lot of technologies coming up everything from AR and VR to IoT platforms. What Frank hopes to see in the future, is a more open society where data is flowing freely from services. Where everyone can use data from multiple points and multiple services to create something new. We have already seen that there is an enormous amount of data that needs to be managed somehow, so machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision are developing to interesting areas. “We have just collected data more and more and at some point, we have to do something with it! Unused data doesn’t really have any value.”

If you are a person who is interested to learn and not afraid of new challenges, learn more about Anders Innovations.

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