My development speeded up after I accepted team responsibility for the project. The story of Damian Trojanowski

At Unit4, Damian went through the path from a beginner developer through to senior developer, scrum master and, ultimately, Technical Architect. He has special recollections about the Scrum Master’s role. “It is a hard job, but it is also very interesting. I would recommend that you should test yourself in this role as it teaches how a good atmosphere in the team, where you can feel appreciated, contributes to the whole work of the entire team,” he said during our talk.

We discussed with Damian, among other things, the impact a developer has on their own development within the company, and the atmosphere that supports the acquisition of knowledge.

 The career paths of a developer are different and they often depend on a number of factors. What do you think contributed to the fact that you are in the position you are in?

Difficult to say... My career started in a team where there was an amazing atmosphere and everyone had a positive impact on all the other members. An additional characteristic that made this even stronger was one of the policies at the company, namely, team responsibility. Due to this, I was able to learn good practices very quickly and it was easier for me to seek help from more senior or experienced developers. I think that my start was easier also because I treated programming as a passion rather than a job I had to learn to earn a lot in a short time. It seems to me, however, that the main contributor due to which I am where I am now was the amazing people around me.

“An environment conducive to growth” – for many, this is a cliché found in job postings. At that time, how did you verify whether the organisation focuses on the development of a team rather than the development of its individual members?

Actually, it was only with time that I noticed that the team focused on cooperation and not on a self-centred approach to work. In the beginning, it was hard because, basically, we knew nothing about each other, but the positive atmosphere and true collaboration made it possible for us to overcome the obstacles that we would not have been able to overcome if each of us had worked alone. Of course, working in a team did not exclude, in any way, our individual development.

Let’s touch upon your entry into the IT industry. Do you remember what your resume said when you were looking for your first IT job?

I remember that it was difficult to find an internship as a student. The IT market in Wroc?aw was not so diverse yet and there were not as many offers then; luckily, after I submitted my resume to a number of companies, I received a call from Teta (now Unit 4 Polska Sp. z o.o.). In my resume, I included information about the projects I had done in my spare time and the address to the homepage of an online shop that I had created using the PHP scripting language. Apart from that, I had already completed C# course then, which was rare those days. I was concerned that it might not be enough to be accepted because I did not have any commercial experience, but I succeeded.

What did the IT market look like then? Was everyone accepted, or did you go through an extensive recruitment process?

It is actually difficult to say because I was accepted by the first company which decided to interview me. The interview itself is a single two-hour session consisting of a talk with the manager and a technical test talk. Now, this process is still the same at Unit4. It starts with telephone screening and the next stage is a talk via MS Teams, which lasts one hour and a half to two hours. We do not send homework to candidates.

From what my colleagues say, other companies had more extensive recruitment processes which sometimes consisted of three stages.

Do you think it is easier to enter the IT industry today?

It seems so to me. There are plenty of offers related to IT jobs, not only for developers. The IT market is one of the fastest-growing markets in Poland, while in the industry there is a saying that this is one of the few cases where it is the employee who chooses the employer, and not the other way round. One example of this wonderful development is your portal which allows the user to choose employment with a huge number of employers from across Poland and other places as well!

What surprised you in your first job?

I have very good memories of my first job, so I was surprised only in a positive way. I remember that the biggest surprise was how Unit 4 could fit into my schedule (during my internship, I was still studying a full-time programme and I did not want to sacrifice that), and how flexible my work could be, as I was able to work as much as I wanted. During increased learning time (that is, an exam session), I had a choice to either not work at all or start at 4 pm and finish after 8 pm. As I have already mentioned, I was very pleasantly surprised by the atmosphere in the team and the help of others.

What was your path like later?

After my graduation, I moved to Global R&D at Unit4, where I work until now. I have very nice memories of the times when I started as a novice developer and, absorbing loads of knowledge, went through the successive stages of development to finally assume an additional role of a Scrum Master. It is a hard job, but it is also very interesting. I would recommend that you should test yourself in this role as it teaches how a good atmosphere in the team, where you can feel appreciated, contributes to the whole work of the entire team.

ERP systems are characterised by their modular design – there are several teams working in parallel to create Financial modules, Staff modules, etc. Therefore, at Unit4, teams working on a specific module are divided into “domains”. The next stage in my career was the position of Lead Engineer for the Financial Domain, which was extremely demanding, especially because as a domain, we were being introduced to a completely new product. The vast knowledge we had to absorb and the way that knowledge was distributed between the teams was something to focus on. The same was true about developing new, better practices to create a code in an already existing product. The last stage of the career was the position I hold now, namely, the position of an Architect for the Financial Domain in Wroc?aw.

What was the most frequent reason for a change in your position?

It was usually my promotion or desire to try something new. I never close myself to new opportunities and I am willing to explore the limits of my skills and abilities. At Unit 4, we place a strong focus on our employees. We conduct external recruitment processes mainly to find juniors and regulars. We recruit Seniors, Leads and Engineering Managers within the company.

What could make your career path end up in a different way?

Many factors. At Unit4, we can choose a career path depending on our interests, character, and the soft and hard skills we have. There is no clear rule that would prevent you from becoming a manager if you are a developer. Also, if you are interested in functional requirements or developing documentation, you can change your position to become a Business Analyst or Technical Writer. In my opinion, a career path is, to a great extent, determined by the talks you have with your direct superiors, which help you choose the direction you want to follow in your career; however, the greater part of it depends on you, on how hard you try and what your desired direction of growth is.

In my case, after I had worked for some time as a developer, I wanted to see what it could be like if I worked in the role of a manager. I was offered an additional role of a Scrum Master, which was to test whether I was actually good for that position. It was something completely different from what I did before because to be a Scrum Master, you need to have completely different character traits than when you are a developer. I needed to show decisiveness, the ability to cope with stress and communicativeness. But I am in love with software development so I went back to it fairly quickly.

Today, you are a Technical Architect. What do you do? Are the tasks in this position different depending on the industry?

A Technical Architect is someone who is both an expert in a particular software area and a mentor to others. It is a person who works for developer teams on software architecture solutions, suggesting ideas and explaining the possible consequences of their use. A Technical Architect introduces new technologies after reviewing and verifying their prototypes, or “proof of concepts”, and adjusts the operation of these technologies to the existing architecture.

This role really has a lot of duties, and there is a great responsibility resting on the architect themselves, so it is nice if you have soft skills, such as communication skills or stress resistance, apart from area-specific skills. Obviously, the tasks of this role differ depending on the company and its profile. If the company produces software for a particular client, the duties of this role may be expanded to include, for example, a collection of functional and non-functional requirements.

You are currently working on an ERPx project. Tell me about it – what technology was used to create it, what has so far been the biggest challenge related to its creation?

An ERPX project is something new at Unit4. It is a multi-tenant, fully cloud-based ERP product based on its predecessor, which features extensive business management processes. It is a project created in many technologies but the dominant one is Microsoft .NET. In ERPX, many new things have been introduced to automate tedious processes that were so far entered manually. With tools such as Unit4 Extension Kit or Unit4 Integration Kit, each of our clients can change and set the workflow of a specific process in their business as they like.

We are introducing new solutions in the form of microservices, which allow for integration with other Unit4 products within the Unit4 ecosystem, and with external products that support the business of our clients. Thanks to full integration with the cloud, we are able to take advantage of solutions such as auto-scalability or geo-distribution, which will increase the productivity of our system at the end-users’ site. The icing on the cake is the use of natural language processing to inform the user about events in the system, and the ability to select defined actions using speech only. It seems to me that the greatest challenge is to race against time trying to release all the innovative functionalities, at their best quality, by the deadline.

You have mentioned a career path before. What is your opinion on designing it? Is it possible to plan your future growth in a specific company from month to month?

I think that when designing career paths, you should focus on the qualities that you should have in a given position. It is impossible to plan the development of each and every employee because everyone has a different pace of development, learning and adjustment. However, it is a good idea to show what opportunities there are, what a career in a given company looks like statistically. It is also a nice idea to point to examples of people who followed specific paths. In my opinion, people get the most from this strategy as it lets you illustrate how you can develop and it gives hope that our path will be similar.

Along the way, you have probably come across a number of different developers. Who is easier to work with: those who have less or more experience than you do?

While working in R&D, I met not only developers but also business analysts, testers, managers – in short, people with different degrees of experience and different traits of character. I believe that it is impossible to clearly divide people into those who are easier to work with, because the level of cooperation is affected by many factors, and these are not necessarily related to experience.

I happened to work with people who only started their programming careers, who gained the status of experts very quickly due to their commitment and hard work because apart from having knowledge, it was evident that they wanted to ensure the best quality of whatever they did. There were also more senior developers with a lot of experience, a little less knowledge, but with excellent abilities to motivate others, without which the team would not have been able to do so much. Of course, there were also people who had a negative contribution to the work of the whole team, who, because of their experience, believed that they knew better than the entire group.

How do you develop your skills today? Do you read, listen about new technologies or test them after work?

I try to read as much as possible, explore technical novelties at conferences, develop myself using online courses. In addition, as a team of architects, we try to exchange interesting topics that may be useful in our work. Since the IT market is an incredibly fast-growing one, it is a good idea to engage in the race for new technologies, learn about their advantages and disadvantages and develop outside your area, because this kind of experience may turn out useful in new projects that the company may want to invest in.

What is your plan for yourself? What would you like to achieve in five years’ time?

This sounds a little bit trite, like a standard recruitment question. In fact, I have just started working as an architect, so I try to improve in this direction, in both technical and soft skills terms. Due to the prevailing pandemic situation, the level of difficulty has increased significantly, because it takes additional skills to provide the necessary assistance to development teams in a way that is efficient and understandable under remote conditions.

Communication is one of the challenges facing any company. What is your idea for a clear flow of information in your team? What tools and practices do you use?

Within the teams, we try to talk openly about what hurts us. Appreciating others by giving praise and talking about how we can improve has a positive effect on what kind of team we are. Because we work in Scrum, with each sprint, we have the opportunity to verify what went wrong, find the primary cause and take a specific action on what to do so that this situation does not happen again in the future. In coronavirus times, it is getting more and more difficult to talk to a person's face to face; fortunately, due to tools such as Microsoft Teams, from time to time, we can meet together for a coffee and talk about current affairs.

Damian Trojanowski. Technical Architect at Unit 4. He started his programming adventure while in high school by writing programmes using Turbo Pascal. He successfully wrote a random number generator simulating the way a sports totalisator works. In college, he got to know .NET language better, and in his third year of studies, he got employed at Teta, an ERP software development company. After Teta was taken over by Unit4, after graduation, he moved to Global R&D. Today, he holds the position of an Architect for the Financial Domain.

 Adam ?opusiewicz 28 January 2021

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