I just joined Nitor as Senior AI Engineer
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I just started working as a Senior AI Engineer in another software consulting company: Nitor. Back in January of this very same year I started my stint at Wave Company, and I was not expecting it to be only a few months long, but here we are. New beginnings are always exciting and interesting, but they also normally require adapting to drastic changes. I’m grateful that employers continue to trust in my skills and services, even in a difficult market for software engineers.
Consulting in Finland
I have spent most of my professional career in software consultancies. Only between 2018 and 2020, when I worked for Samsung, did I work for a product house. For the past 5 years I have lived and worked in Finland, in four different consulting companies: Netlight, Reaktor, Wave Company, and now Nitor. There are still plenty of others here in Helsinki, should I “catch 'em all” like a Pokémon trainer? 😂 Honestly I hope I stay at Nitor for a while, I’d like some stability at this point in my life.
Consulting in Finland is quite different than, for example, consulting in the US. The horror stories I hear and read about consultants working overtime in order to get that last PowerPoint slide ready by 23:00 are not what happens in Finland, a country where (thankfully!) work-life balance is respected much more. We’re more like loan engineers over here, where we get assigned to projects and teams in clients and work as (mostly) regular employees there.
I sometimes wonder why Finnish companies hire consultants to do the work that a regular software engineer would do, since consultants are more expensive. A big part of it is probably that Finnish law makes it really difficult to fire employees after their probation period. With consultants, you can hire them temporally and let them go at any moment. This means that we consultants might live on the edge and with more stress than our in-house engineer counterparts, but in exchange we usually get a better salary and more benefits from our employers. I have also noticed that it’s easier for me to end up in consulting companies because their hiring process is smoother than regular companies (who take forever to hire people in a very cumbersome process, often lowballing you if they do make an offer).
First Impressions at Nitor
My colleagues Antti and Amir together with me on our first day at Nitor, company of G.O.A.T.s
I have barely been 10 days in Nitor, but there is already one nice thing and one less nice thing I can say about working here.
👍 Nitor Iron Bank
I feel that work equipment influences employees directly, for better or for worse. When a company provides high quality devices and machines for their employees to do their job, they feel valued and cared for. And if instead the company gives you the cheapest gear that barely allows you to do your job, you feel strictly like a pair of hands. It is of course a delicate balance between giving an employee everything they need and want to be happy without overspending or provoking jealousy in other employees who didn’t get the same specs.
This is why I have been impressed with Nitor’s solution: the Nitor Iron Bank. Apart from evoking fond Game of Thrones memories of the Iron Bank of Braavos, this solution to employee equipment is really elegant. Employees start with a generous budget, and they are free to choose pretty much any work equipment and gear that they want within that budget. The budget then accumulates slowly every month, so by the time you need to repair or renew your devices, you can use your budget again. If at any point you’re out of budget, you can access used and loan devices on emergencies. Simple, yet elegant: employees are happy to choose what they want, but they also need to be responsible with their allocated budget.
👎 Nitor uses MS365 Workspace
The vast majority of software companies use one of two enterprise workspaces: either Google Workspace or MS365 Workspace. In my opinion Google’s Workspace is vastly superior to Microsoft’s. And yet MS365 is used a ton in the industry. Sadly, Nitor uses the MS365 Workspace. I’d rather not use Microsoft products if I can help it, but looks like I don’t have much of a choice here. A lot of Nitor consultants share my tastes: in their latest developer survey Microsoft products were in general not very liked, with Microsoft Teams being the most hated product of all. 😂 And as it was to be expected, getting access to my Microsoft Entra ID was NOT a smooth experience! In my current setup, I need to run two different browsers: Mozilla Firefox in order to authenticate with the Microsoft Entra ID, and Brave Browser because it’s my current browser of choice (but it has problems to authenticate with Microsoft Entra ID, check out this GitHub issue). Yay for hybrid workflows! 😂
Nitor Rebranding
Coincidentally, Nitor has decided to rebrand itself exactly at the same time as I have joined the company. We’ve gone from blue and purple shades to dynamic red and black shades. The logo has been simplified, but the firey torch is still present. “Nitor” means “brightness, brilliance, striving” in Latin, and the torch comes from a Greek mythology story of how Prometheus stole the fire from the gods. The idea is that Nitor is here to illuminate the world in the software industry via cutting-edge technology and excellent delivery. That’s a brand I certainly feel identified with! 😀
