Erika Laamanen, Fondion’s Frontend-focused Fullstack Engineer, has been in our engineering team the longest. At the moment, our engineering team is undergoing a lot of changes! We are coding new features, and older code is being rewritten – there is a lot to do. What is more, we are currently strengthening our in-house core engineering team.
Over Slack Huddle, Erika took the time to answer a few interview questions about working at Fondion right now, and her career dreams for the future. Read 3 interesting things she mentioned below!
3 things to say about Frontend Engineering at Fondion
#1 “We have a highly skilled team”
According to Erika, working with Fondion's SaaS product requires an attitude and a willingness to do versatile tasks around the application. It also requires strong experience and technical knowledge. And courage! Highly skilled and experienced professionals are the foundation of our inhouse engineering team. Why?
“We have to dare to make updates to quite critical features that have an impact on many people’s work. It requires you not to hesitate, even if you are not immediately sure of the solution. Technical know-how is of course important, having enough experience to cope with challenging situations”, Erika thinks.
In challenges, you have the support of high-class team mates with considerable expertise. New things are primarily built together as a team.
“We have a really tough team, which I am super happy about. Our Tech Lead Kimi, as well as the latest newcomers, Ville and Pourya are all top-notch experts.”
“We have a really tough team, which I am super happy about. Our Tech Lead Kimi, as well as the latest newcomers, Ville and Pourya are all top-notch experts. For Ville and Pourya, the first few weeks were about onboarding and learning, but they jumped in very quickly. Now after a few months, they are already supporting our team's work immensely,” Erika says.
After the initial phases of Fondion, a strategic decision was made that the developers in a consulting role would be replaced with a strong internal core team. The goal is to work on Fondion’s product in the long term, looking far into the future!
#2 “Interesting things to learn, and a chance to focus on what you love most”
Erika herself is originally a career changer. With a background as a doctor of literature, she wanted to practically try out what a different kind of writing would look like.
"I was interested in coding, so I initially took a short course. But it was only in practice that I found out if I liked it. The result was that I really liked it!" Erika thinks back.
Now 5 years later, after working in consultant roles, Erika is for the first time in a product company, Fondion.
"At this point in my career, I felt like I wanted to join a SaaS company. I wanted to focus on one application and have challenging tasks, and not just work on a small, simple application. It is interesting that there will continue to be development and challenges in Fondion’s product," Erika says.
At Fondion, Erika’s attention was first drawn to the fact that the engineering team has a high interest in quality. For example, it means running automated tests and being ready to rewrite the code when needed. At this stage of the company, there are a lot of new things to develop – and a lot of opportunities to learn.
“If you just want to focus on coding, it is possible here. The scale of the technologies in use is large, so you can also just focus on deepening your competence in these.”
"Next, I would like to learn how to run end-to-end tests and gain experience from the infrastructure side – cloud services. But I also hope that I can focus a lot on frontend development. If you just want to focus on coding, it is possible here. The scale of the technologies in use is large, so you can also just focus on deepening your competence in these", Erika says.
#3 “A team built to work remotely – but in strong, long-term collaboration”
"If you compare it to an agency, in a product company we think about the life cycle of the product we’re building differently. We constantly work for this in the team, and think in the longer term," says Erika.
“If you compare it to an agency, in a product company we think about the life cycle of the product we’re building in the longer term.”
In Fondion's small team, everything is done together and we often ask each other for advice. Even if the team mostly works remotely. Many team members work in different cities, sometimes even from different countries.
“We don't just code features alone in our own cubicles, but we talk with each other a lot. People in our team are very nice and friendly. It has a big impact on job satisfaction”, Erika says.
“You hear how excited the product team is about new features. It brings a nice perspective when you yourself are often happy about a small piece of code you wrote.”
You can also meet the rest of Fondion's team at the office in Espoo. Erika visits the office about once a week.
"It's nice when you see people from other teams at the office. You might hear how excited the product team is about new features and good feedback from customers. It brings a nice perspective when you yourself are often happy about a small piece of code you wrote," Erika says.
According to Erika, the future at Fondion in general looks very promising. From a developer's point of view, it means exciting projects.
“We are building a sustainable SaaS product, improving maintainability and capacity. At the same time, we are building a lot of new features. And I of course hope the team will grow even more soon!” Erika smiles.
