I started at virtual7 in September 2003. After such a long time, I naturally thought about whether it might be time to see something else and work somewhere else. In the end, what has kept me going for so long is that I haven’t always done the same thing over the past 18 years. Like oneself, virtual7 is constantly evolving. Stagnation was never a thing at virtual7. I learn something new every single day at work. That’s why I’ve never had the urge to go anywhere else.

I started with an apprenticeship as an IT specialist in application development at virtual7. At that time, the Karlsruhe Research Center (now KIT Campus North) was a partner company of virtual7 GmbH. So I was employed by the research center, but I learned at virtual7. Quite early on, I also started to support other topics and thus moved more and more in the administrative direction. After some time I took over the administration of our internal systems completely. I stayed in the administrative direction after my apprenticeship. This means that I did less and less programming and took more and more care of our servers and those of our customers. The special thing about this development was that virtual7 was not looking for an infrastructure specialist, it just turned out that I like to do this and that my strengths lie in it. Three years ago I got the offer to lead the team Infrastructure and Operations, as it was called at that time. After a short period of reflection, I gladly accepted this offer and continued to take on new tasks. With the responsive company organization, things changed again. The responsibilities of the managerial position were reflected in various Roles. Some of these Roles and responsibilities were taken over by other team members. I have retained only some parts.

What’s particularly important to me at work is that I can work independently. I can’t imagine working somewhere where someone is always looking over my shoulder and telling me what to do. Since I’ve spent my entire professional life at virtual7, I don’t really have anything to compare it with. However, you always get to see how things are done in other companies. In my opinion, the employees are the ones who know the most about operational processes. After all, they have the most contact with it in their daily work. I don’t want anyone interfering in these processes and dictating their way of working to me. That’s why the certain freedoms I have at virtual7 are important to me. If something doesn’t work right, I appreciate the open way of dealing with each other, both among colleagues and with the Managing Directors.

What I find totally exciting is to be faced with a challenging problem. Be it a server error or something else that doesn’t work. Then I sometimes sit for days trying to find the solution to the problem. I can dig into the smallest details. I look at the source codes of the underlying server software and try to understand it. I look into the individual network packets to understand what is happening in the background. I try to find out as much as possible about the whole process to be able to deduce where the error comes from. It is a challenge and at the same time very interesting to get deep into the problem. These are the moments when you can learn the most. I tell new colleagues in infrastructure all the time. It’s nice when you can set up a server and everything works great. If you want to learn something, a tricky problem is the best thing that can happen to you. Only then do you really go deep into the matter and understand how things are connected and where you can change adjusting screws to get to the solution.

These are things that can really captivate me and where my spiritual connection and logical thinking come into play. I’ve really solved a lot of exotic problems myself because no one has ever had this problem and been able to help me – not even the Internet.

It is difficult to say that certain roles are more important than others. There are Fundamental Roles that a Cluster needs to function, but that doesn’t make the other roles any less important. I like all my Roles, even if I have a lot of them. A reason for that is, that some of the responsibilities of my position as head converted into roles.  How much effort or time I put into each Role varies. Recently we had the internal annual meetings, which take up quite a lot of time in the Team Development role. I have to gather a lot of information for this. Due to salary requests, the Budget Management Role is also important. As soon as the Strategy Discourse comes up, I spend more time in the Strategy Development Role. And then there’s budget planning twice a year. Once all that is over, I can move on to the operational Roles.