Interview with Aysenur

Tell us something about yourself!

My name is Aysenur, I’m from Turkey and I have been working as a software engineer for 8 years. I live in Amsterdam with my husband and 2 cats. Currently I’m working as a backend developer at Realworks. When I joined Realworks a couple years ago I started at team CRM (the legacy application), but now I’m working on microservices implementation. This is quite exciting because I started to learn new technologies.

Why Realworks?

I was living in Poland, and I visited friends who live in Amsterdam. She told us nice things about the culture here and about her job. We decided to look for jobs there. I had an interview with Isa Beau, she is one of the recruiters at Realworks. It was very nice, because she helped me a lot to explain everything about the company and about the city. Realworks is a nice place to work with, we are like a family. You feel very comfortable, like you are at home.

What does your team look like?

I really like my team because everyone is helpful and communicates well. I can ask everyone questions, and they will help me. We start organising some team events these days. This gives us the chance to get to know each other better. I’m happy to be part of this team.

What does your day at Realworks look like?

My working days are not too busy, we are constantly implementing new technologies. It’s a learning path right now. Nobody knows what we should do, so we are learning together. But after this quarter, it will be better than this. But it’s really fun!

What do you like most about Realworks?

Realworks is very supportive. For example, right now I have to work in Poland. Normally it’s not allowed to work abroad (only working from your home country). I just told my situation with Esther (HR Manager) and Sha (CEO), they understood the situation. Recently there was an earthquake in Turkey, I lost one of my friends. A lot of people asked me how it’s going in Turkey, how I felt and if I needed an extra break. It’s very supportive, I really feel well.

How did you experience your first week at Realworks?

The onboarding week was nice. First I had some meetings with the Product Owners of every team. They took the time to explain the projects they were working on in detail. Because Realworks is doing something different, which I didn’t have experience with. This was very nice and helped me understand how Realworks works. After this week, I had a buddy in the team, he helped me with, for example, my laptop and explained everything about the project.

How do you keep your knowledge up-to-date?

We have some training with other teams, for example, the tech or sysadmin team, to learn more technologies. And we have a learning & development budget (with the value of € 2.000,-), I want to use this for some certificates to keep myself up to date.

 What’s it like to be a woman in the tech world?

 It would be amazing if there were more women. But right now, it’s okay. Everybody at our company and in my team is very nice and polite. It’s not hard to communicate with them. We have only 3 female developers at Realworks right now, so I hope there will be more soon!

 What was your relocation experience like?

It was a bit of a challenge finding a place to live in Amsterdam because of the competitive housing market, but luckily we were able to find some great apartments online with the help of Isa Beau, one of the recruiters at Realworks. She even went to the viewings for us and worked with the broker to ensure everything was ready for us before we arrived in Amsterdam. Overall, our relocation experience was pretty smooth thanks to the support from Realworks.