What does a typical workday look like for our software developers and our other talented employees working within tech? And how would they describe the developer community? In this interview series, we have talked to one Product Development Director, one Product Insights Lead, one Cloud and Engineering department Lead, and one full-stack senior consultant in Visma about the developer and tech community at Visma.
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Q&A with Brian Ye
Tell us a little bit about your background?
My name is Brian Ye and I currently work as a Product Insights Lead in the Data Science Tech Hub. I’m helping teams get better at product insights and utilising their behavioural data.
I have an MSc degree in Computer Science, majoring in IT management from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. During my studies, I got a solid technical and theoretical understanding of computation, computer science, and advanced analytics.
For the last four years, I’ve been working at Visma in varying roles and various domains. As a management trainee, I conducted five different projects across the Visma Group. The projects ranged from analytics in the finance domain, and enabling sales processes with data, acting as product owner, to developing a chatbot service to automate customer support.
After that, I’ve mainly worked in the data analytics and data science domain. My tasks include streamlining financial operations for 300 FTEs and automating SLA reporting for Visma’s single largest account. I also work on time-series forecasting and customer retention analysis.
Before Visma, I worked with network surveillance for a Swedish telecom company and QA engineering for a Swedish fintech company.
Now, I mainly work with product insights, where I have deployed and am currently managing a behavioural data collection platform. I help teams get onboarded and create data assets out of it with the available tools.
What does a typical workday look like for you?
I think the only consistent thing happening at work is that I have lunch sometime during the day and that I wake up in the morning. Otherwise, I must say each workday is unique.
One day might be filled with stakeholder meetings with business users, whereas other days I may be pushing new infrastructure code to a software repository. New challenges and opportunities arise every day, which means new ways of thinking all the time.
This is very stimulating because innovation is key for both successful tech companies as well as for my motivation.
From your experience, how does Visma’s tech culture differ from other companies?
I think Visma has many things that match my values and also have good similarities with other organisations I have worked with previously. For example, Visma has a humane culture that prioritises the employee highly.
It is interesting how Visma has a lean way of thinking: always do what gives the best output but also be open to experiment on new things.
How does Visma facilitate developer communities?
We have several platforms to enable a developer community, ranging from Visma Space (powered by Happeo), Slack channels, and the Visma Tech Academy. I think all of these are necessary to embrace what is important, rewarding people for competence and knowledge, and their professional growth.
At Visma, we are committed to being an inclusive and welcoming workplace for everyone. Especially in development, we see that diverse teams develop better software solutions–and we have more fun while working.
What are the main benefits of working in diverse teams, and why do you think it is important?
Working in a diverse environment is crucial for continuous growth, especially in tech. Innovation is our bread and butter and the best way to fuel that is to get as many perspectives as possible.
This allows us not only to reach a larger audience but also to help us pinpoint weaknesses in our way of thinking and iteratively correct them. Having a good culture is diversity’s foundation.
A successful tech company can also showcase diversity in all types of roles, regardless of whether you are a board member, a developer, a managing director, a support officer, or a sales rep. I think the best tech companies will be able to leverage this efficiently since the potential is huge here.
For someone interested in becoming a developer at Visma, what are the top 3 things they should know?
- If you want to be a creator of the world, a developer is the best choice in the tech field.
- Don’t let people take your knowledge for granted.
- You’ll get great colleagues!
