Inspired by a similar event at EAWAG, we held an internal Career-focused DevExchange event at WSL. We had 4 research software engineers among ourselves highlighting their career paths so far and their expectations and experiences with software engineering at WSL. We also discussed the possibilities that they see for an improvement in software engineering at WSL.
Our Event Story
- Welcome and Agenda: Ionut Iosifescu Enescu
- Presentations
- Enikö Fey
- Ranita Pal
- Dominik Haas
- Christoph Tellenbach
- Discussions
How our event ran
We had some very interesting presentations from colleagues who have backgrounds in industry and academia. Each of the speakers presented a bit of their life’s journey prior to becoming a Research software engineer and how their path led them to their careers today. The driving factors for their careers turned out to be pretty diverse - forests, data management, design and coding.
Positive highlights for typical RSE at WSL:
- Feels motivated and enjoyed working in environmental research.
- Exploring and experimenting a variety of topics.
- Quality over quantity.
- Ability to control the workload percentage to manage work-life balance.
- Ability to work in all parts of the project and holding a major share of the responsibilities.
Improvements to be noted:
- Practicing the culture of giving tips to colleagues to tackle different problems.
- ETH domain has educational requirements for promotions but no definite structure for continuing education and no dedicated time percentage for upskilling.
- More high level exchanges among colleagues would be welcome.
Since some of our colleagues are on the search for future job positions we also got some valuable feedback to make this process smoother. Some of these suggestions include
- Call or contact if details are provided for a position.
- It is assumed that most of the positions go unadvertised. Need to make use of connections to know about those or asking the HR about appropriate positions.
- Participation in Developer events like meetups and forming connections.
- Managing expectations from a job position - getting minimum requirements, clear communication, workload capacities.