- Espen Mauseth
NEW IN DNB: Corporate and Greenhouse (tech) graduates on our first day of work.
How does an overconfident and fresh business graduate fare against people who talk exclusively in abbreviations, with 15+ years of experience in engineering and computer science?
Sit tight, and I'll tell you all about it.
Bold, brazen or both?
After six long years of studying business, I am finally knee deep in student debt, and may proudly say that my degree is complete. Strictly speaking, my chosen specialization during my master’s degree was to be a management consultant, business analyst or similar, so how did I end up in tech?
To make a long story short, I was dead set on starting my career in DNB, as I’d spent all my years studying working as a customer advisor both for private and corporate customers. My former colleagues and the responsibilities I’ve had have been so fulfilling that I was assured that if I began my career in DNB, I would have the best start I possibly could have gotten. The question was just where the heck do I start?
DNB is a gargantuan organization, particularly by Norwegian standards, and sits at the epicenter of the Norwegian economy. As a business student, you quickly realize that pretty much everything DNB does is somehow relevant. Thus, DNBs Corporate Graduate program seemed like the best choice for furthering my career. The program is tailored for fresh business students wanting to kickstart their career with the help of HR, who will guide you to the right places in the organization should you need it. So again, why on Earth would they place me in tech?
I knew nothing about financial technology
In the middle of August when I began working, I knew second to nothing about financial technology, nor technology peripheral to fintech for that matter. I had certainly worked with DNBs various banking systems as a customer advisor, but I had no clue how these functioned once you popped open the hood.
As you familiarize yourself with these customer processing systems, you get this notion that “it can’t seriously be that hard to simply add this button here, or this function there”, but I quickly understood that it usually isn’t necessarily that simple. However, having aided approximately 30 000 customers over the years I’d been here before, I had an excellent starting point to begin working on customer needs, as I knew them very clearly.
Thus, on August 15th 2022, I spent my first day at DNBs Private Market Digital division, specifically in the development of web-related activities. Again, I had very few prerequisites for mastering this type of work. I had never worked agile before, I had never learned about anything but business, marketing, strategy, or finance.
It is tough
What I did know however, was that I would be able to learn, given how many different subjects and topics I had mastered before, and I am still young and dumb enough to believe I can master anything.
My manager is a former business and finance guy, so it can’t be that different, right? I've restarted our router a million times, I know all the PowerPoint shortcuts, and you'll even find the odd Run command open on my desktop at home from time to time. I felt ready. I was ready. Hence, to a business graduate this all seems fine and dandy on paper, but what is it like actually working with development as a business grad?
The answer is that it is tough.
Welcome to the jungle
In the beginning I understood nothing. Nothing. At. All. The amounts of abbreviations were infuriating, the sheer number of stakeholders were completely unmanageable, the amount of different people to adhere to was overwhelming, and the infrastructure of the numerous systems felt chaotic to say the least.
I like to compare my experiences in the very beginning to being dropped from a helicopter into the thickest jungle imaginable, machete in hand and nothing else, and being told “You’ll figure it out” over buzzy radio transmission. There’ll be plants, animals and terrain you’ve never been subject to before, and you’ll very likely not know where to even begin with navigating.
As a disclaimer, this is by no means me critiquing my managers. Rather, it's a way of conceptualizing just how disorienting and brutal it can feel to learn a new subject when you're diving straight into it, but I digress.
The first thing I saw as I exited the elevator to DNB's 8th floor. Not literally of course, but you get the idea.
You get a far more holistic picture of how long certain tasks takes
The truth is that DNB is in fact a vast jungle of different systems. Currently, we're moving away from our old mainframe-based systems and over to the cloud. Being in the middle of this technological transformation means a metric ton of APIs, lots of systems where half of it is in the cloud, and the other half on the mainframe, leading to deprioritization of maintenance and development of exisitng systems on the path to discontinuation.
As a former customer advisor, it's very interesting and valuable to work in such an environment, because you get a far more holistic picture of how long certain tasks take, why certain things aren't prioritized and why you can't simply "add another button here". It is an excellent place to learn and build skills that I'm sure is hard to come by in other places. The utter size of DNB alone yields fantastic training in stakeholder management, product strategy and gaining insight into how one may prioritize right.
Working agile has been quite different to me
Working agile has also been quite different to me and has taken some time getting used to. The agile way of work is not necessarily something that is preached all that much when you're attending a business school (at least not the one I went to), and simply iterating on existing properties continually was a bit odd to me at first.
I now however see the usefulness of this, especially considering how quickly the backlog adds up. Still, DNB is so massive, and the number of stakeholders makes it hard to iterate as rapidly as one may want, but I see enormous potential for growth once we get the proper hang of the working method and all teams are aligned.
I quickly learned that I was a luddite
Finally, I realize that I have so, so much more to learn here, and I have really only scratched the surface of the vast and deep world of tech. My job is to deploy our solutions towards the users, and to figure out how to monetize, scale and grow them. That's more akin to what I learned in school. The hard part is building them.
So while I might have felt like quite the tech-savvy computer crackerjack prior to entering the 8th floor of DNBs Bjørvika office building, I quickly learned that I was a luddite compared to my now-colleagues. It has been a very humbling experience, and I must say that I have gained a profound respect for anyone calling themselves engineers to UX designers, to computer scientists, to everything in-between.
A humbling experience
What was the point of this blog post? To be honest, I’m not sure. I usually just do – then reflect. Sometimes it just helps to write things down and categorize your thoughts. I suppose what you may take away from this is split.
If you’re a developer: Know that us business simpletons admire you. The sheer skill and technical prowess it takes to develop has astounded me beyond what I would ever have imagined (just take a look at the other posts on this blog - I understand nothing!), and I have the deepest respect for the finnicky and intricate work you do. Also, sometimes you may take benefit from deliberately taking it slow and dumbing things down so we may follow and understand on a deeper level - sometimes less is more.
If you’re a businessperson: If you have ever considered or been curious about tech, you should definitely give it a try. The learning curve is steep as Galdhøpiggen and don’t expect anyone to hold your hand. Be curious, take initiative, and ask questions. The latter I cannot stress enough. Ask enough, and you’ll eventually come across the elusive engineer who is not only an avid programmer, but also able to utilize the power of metaphor to explain otherwise esoteric and unintelligible concepts in a straight-forward manner. Tech is the future, and you’ll better learn how to do this now than later, because It’s not getting easier.
If you made it to the end, I must commend your fortitude and resolve. I’m no writer, nor am I a poet, so if you made it here even out of pity, I thank you for reading my thoughts. Should you like to have a chat, have questions about me and what I do in DNB, or simply to give feedback, do not hesitate to reach out to me by email. I’m always available to ardent and enthusiastic people.
Thank you for reading, see you on the flipside.
