Peter Seehaus reports

Enough opportunities for change

In 2003, after my first years of work experience, I started looking for a new employer. My main criteria at the time were a different product sector and a pleasant working environment with modern equipment. SEW-EURODRIVE met both criteria.

I'd been working in embedded programming at an automotive supplier, but now I had the chance to work on something closer to what I'd studied: electrical energy engineering with a focus on automation technology. In this role, a programmer is faced with the challenge of bringing together the high real-time requirements of control with the long computing times of the various communication interfaces.

Before I started, SEW-EURODRIVE's management had decided to further strengthen its development location in Germany. As a result, I worked from day one in a modern office building with well-lit rooms and desks whose height could be adjusted electrically, just to give you an idea.

While working as a programmer, I always enjoyed being involved in work organization. Because software development has grown continuously in the past few years, this field has also become increasingly important for us. The first step was introducing a modern source code management system. In cooperation with IT, we decided on the Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), which was relatively new at the time. Because this tool is very complex and includes not only source code management, but also the entire application lifecycle management (ALM), I was able to become a tool manager for our department. In this role, I now help my colleagues with any questions they have about the new and old tools, analyze the requirements for our ALM and try to implement them in TFS in the best way possible.

Now, more and more departments want to use this technology. I really enjoy sharing my experiences with my colleagues. At the same time, this allows me to learn about other areas of the company and meet colleagues from other departments. As the responsible software developer, I'll now have this experience again for a new product. I hope I can use this experience to come up with further improvements for the process and how it's implemented.

I can gain the knowledge that I need for my changing tasks through further training and seminars, which I can often pick out for myself in consultation with my supervisor. Some of them are held in the state-of-the-art DriveAcademy^® at our Bruchsal site.

As someone who likes to tackle new tasks, I'm glad I found SEW-EURODRIVE, an employer who will definitely continue to give me new opportunities for change in the future.