Introduction
I started writing this blog post back in May, where I (a bit late) wanted to tell where I went after working for Snow/Sue for 15 years. But I got distracted by other things, amongst them a lot of cool things at work.. so perhaps I should finally finish the entry.
A year ago (wow, time flies!) I rejoined ING. I was looking for a job where I could continue my Coaching experience and continue to learn, and of course using my strong technical background where possible.
During the COVID period, the occasional band “The Streamers”, was on TV, together with a load of ING advertisements. ING sponsored the event and that triggered me to have a look at their jobs.
The role that I found there, interested me a lot, and I decided to just give it a try. It was one of the best decisions of ‘2021’ :-).
Interview
Some old friends still work at ING, so I asked one of them (Hi Marc), what the role was about and what I could expect. Since it involved a lot of coaching and using my technical background (in a bit of a different area then normally), I asked the recruiters to do an interview.
I had an introduction meeting with one of the recruiters, and then with Ad and Edith, and finally with my manager Jos. All conversations where fun conversations and quickly after each other. I got an offer and decided to sign for the offer. We together decided that I would start at Sept 1st 2021.
Starting
So, starting in Covid as Chapter Lead, for a company that I still knew, but changed heavily.. that’s kinda.. interesting. My first day at the office I met Jos in Amsterdam, and together we got my Laptop and he showed me how to set it up and where to find things. I decided to make appointments with everyone from my team and slowly introduce myself in those meetings, how else can you do that when nobody is allowed to go to the office?
I think that was a good call, I quickly made contact with everyone, even with the people not in my direct team and got to learn them a bit. Ofcourse there was more work to do there from my angle, but a start was made. Being a Chapter Lead means HR related activities within ING, so a lot of contact with the people, but also it is a combination role with an engineering part. I did some things with Virtualisation and Storage in the past, but not that heavily as all my fellow technical engineers are doing. Quite a task for me to get up to speed with them and how do I respond to the question: What are you going to focus on and bring to the team Remko? I needed to find a way for quite some time, next to learning everyone and learning ING.
Management
As mentioned I am the Chapter Lead, which means I have HR responsibilities, amongst them helping my team members with their individual development plans, help setting their goals, adressing and resolving issues they come across with, time-off, salaries, health (up to my allowed involvement level). I also have periodic one-on-one conversations with each member of the team. I try to be an open and reachable manager, honest and fair. If I can help, one should let me know, but if I need to make a harder decision, I will always to that. After all, that is part of my job.
Together with a fellow Chapter Lead and the Product Owner, we maintain the virtualisation and storage infrastructure for ING, divided in three teams.
Technical
Next to the managerial part, I also have a technical role. I am an active member of the virtualisation team, where we maintain and manage the Private Cloud Infrastructure for ING. As mentioned I needed to find a way on how to contribute to the team the best as I can, and I think I found a way there with the automation using Ansible. At the moment of writing I am the main person developing (admittedly on the work done by Liam and Leon) the automation roll out further and making it stable. I am also one of the persons in the team that create our Azure DevOps Pipelines, building the CI/CD street for these automations.
Using the Agile approach we do that in a 2 week sprint cycle, and everytime we get more into a stable situation.
One of the things that I really like is that we share our knowledge when we can and offer demo’s etc to our team but also to the rest of the Tribe or wider if needed. Everyone is always willing to help and that makes it the perfect allround team for me.
Your amibition?
My personal amibition is to grow more as Coach, but also get to learn the ropes of the Virtualisation paltform more and more. I am adding value to the team already, but I have a strong drive to do more or be able to do more (if time permits :-)).
If you have Questions or want to be WorkING at ING as well, let me know and I will see what I can do for you!