Hi,

I have decided to go back to working with AWS full time. Even though I had a lot of fun diving into the world of Blazer and Dotnet, I just missed working with AWS too much. So I asked around in the German AWS community if anyone else is looking for a remote AWS DevOps position. Immediately kreuzwerker contacted me. In this post, I want to briefly describe the cool experience during the interviews and onboarding with kreuzwerker. But first, a few words about kreuzwerker.

kreuzwerker

kreuzwerker is an AWS consulting company based in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Munich, Zurich and Warszawa (Poland). It was founded in 2010 by Bernd, Joern Bathel and Tilmann Eing. The main motivation to found kreuzwerker was to create a better environment for IT consultants. kreuzwerker should become a company where employees have fun at work. And as you will read they have achieved their goal!

Interview

I had the interviews with Oliver and Manuel. The conversations with both of them were super cool and I immediately noticed that the company puts a lot of emphasis on a positive culture. The concept of culture and especially a positive once does not seem to be very widespread in Germany. So I will explain it briefly here. Culture means how is the living environment within the company is. For example how the employees interact with each other.

This is also necessary because as an AWS consulting company, complex problems, such as designing and building technological solutions, have to be solved. And this can only be achieved if a positive culture is created in the company. That guarantees that every employee gives it best and can give.

And that kreuzwerker has such a positive culture, I noticed immediately during the interviews with Oliver and Manuel. I think they also noticed that I fit in well with this culture. Yes, and indeed, appearances have not dimmed. In my first onboarding days, I was able to experience how great kreuzwerker is.

Onboarding

In this section, I would like to tell you about my onboarding days. I had my onboarding in the Berlin kreuzwerker office. The office is very central in Berlin. Since I live a good two hours outside of Berlin and have never worked in Berlin before, I found it very exciting to come into the office.

In the reception, I was greeted very warmly by the office manager and had a small room tour. Since we are still in the middle of the pandemic and it was also the first week in 2022, the office was less staffed. But that made it easier to remember the new names. I think names are very important and I try to keep them in my head.

And then it was off to my first appointment with the IT staff. The IT staff explained the systems I used and handed over my hardware. I found and still find my new MacBook with the M1 chip very exciting. It has been a few years since I used a MacBook. I currently use Ubuntu exclusively. But I immediately felt happy again with the MacBook.

The following days contained usual onboarding stuff. I did online courses about security at work, with data and how to design my workstation ergonomically correct or how to use JIRA. The fancy video animations in the courses made this rather dry part quite entertaining. And actually, I learned one or two interesting things about data security :). I also find it extremely cool that there is a cook who provides us with a delicious and healthy lunch every day.

I already mentioned how important a positive culture is. What fascinated me was that during my days of onboarding, I noticed this positive culture not only among the developers but also among all the other employees. I think it's so great that kreuzwerker manages to get all employees to interact positively with each other.

I have already met two developers from my team. Both are still at the beginning of their career as I am already a few years ahead ^^. We had great conversations. I'm impressed how far both are already in their development as developers. At the end of January, we plan to go to Frankfurt to meet the rest of the team. I'm really looking forward to that.

Summary

The interview and the first days of onboarding at kreuzwerker were fantastic. I have briefly described here what this experience was like. I'm very grateful to be part of the kreuzwerker team and, I'm looking forward to working with our customers to build technical solutions they will love :). If you also want to work for kreuzwerker, feel free to contact me. See you soon :).

Thanks to the DeepL translater (free version) for helping with translating to English and saving me tons of time :).

To the wonderful readers of this article, I'm saying that feedback of any kind is welcome. In the future, I will try to include a discussion and comment feature here. In the meantime, please feel free to send me feedback via my social media accounts such as Twitter or FaceBook. Thank you very much :).

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