Erik Mainz A/S
Systems Engineer / Software Developer
Copenhagen, Denmark
1987 |
After a couple of years in University I decided to
take a year off to work full-time as a software developer for a small
Danish company called Erik Mainz A/S.
For Erik Mainz, I worked on a project where we
developed an administrative software package for a company offering
consulting services and courses to Danish companies. This company needed
an application to organize all the activities that they were involved
in. In those days, time and resource management applications were not as
readily available as they are today, and they had therefore asked Erik
Mainz to develop it.
When I joined the company the initial project
description had already been done and the project manager had
started doing some of the development. But since I quickly impressed the
team with my software development skills, the project manager started
letting me do more and more of the planning and management. In the end
he concentrated on other projects.
Unfortunately, although I was a brilliant programmer,
I was not yet capable of running a software project by myself. The fact
that the client was difficult to handle only made things worse. I made
all the classical mistakes of running a software development project,
and although in the end we did manage to deliver the software to the
client, there were severe problems with it and we had to do a lot of
follow up to make the client reasonably happy.
The main problem was the lack of communication between
the client and the development team. The project manager had been
responsible for this, but as he left the project more and more in my
hands, he did not ensure that I took over this role. Being a beginner, I
on my hand did not realize the importance of it and never really
developed a relationship to the client. There were also problems with
the platform and development language that we were using, which meant
that the application was slow and difficult to work with.
In the end I was very disillusioned. But I had learned
tremendously from the experience. Although I had originally not been
very keen on going back to my studies, I now realized how much I still
had to learn. So I returned to my studies with renewed enthusiasm and an
urge to learn more.
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