Big Industries Academy
How did you find out about Big Industries?
During the end of my masters’ studies, I had started out to apply for jobs and I noticed the job posting on LinkedIn. I checked the LinkedIn page and the company website. Going through the content assured me that Big Industries is a good place to get into Data Engineering jobs. I applied and was fortunately selected.
What do you like about working for Big Industries?
Big Industries has a small team of consultants deployed at various clients. This brings in a lot of variety of experiences which are shared monthly with each other. In times of need team members help each other by posting their problems and solutions on the common forum which is nice.
There is a good degree of flexibility and that helps in maintaining the general work life balance. Having joined the team during the COVID pandemic, I always look forward to Academy days where I get to meet everyone in person, have a good time talking and sometimes doing fun activities.
What was something new you had to learn to do your job?
The whole world of real-time data streaming was new to me. I had to learn what Apache Kafka is and how to develop these applications. Apart from academic environment I did not have a lot of experience working on a production grade Java application, while building this streaming application I learnt a lot of small nitty gritties that are involved in such projects.
How does your work week look like?
It’s a normal 9-5 routine usually but there is a lot of flexibility. For example, there was a period when I had to take driving classes of 2hours which sometimes overlapped with work hours. Thanks to the flexible approach, I could manage my time better to include these classes. My day-to-day work is usually building and maintaining streaming applications. Apart from that there are also a lot of support tasks like extracting data, helping business users with their SQL queries and so on.
What technology do you like most?
For me, I enjoy working on streaming applications where there are technologies like Apache Kafka, Spark and Hive into play. I have earlier built ETL apps in traditional data warehouse and now doing ETL in cloud/big data kind of completes the circle.
Share your wisdom, Feed the family feel, Dare to grow; can you give an example of a situation where these values were put in practice?
When I was fairly new in the project, there was an instance when I had to answer a question about the project on my toes in a meeting with an external vendor. That was a moment where I shared my wisdom that I had acquired in a short time and also dared to grow.
On a lighter note, there was another dare to grow moment when my company car was handed over to me, I had to drive back home without having ever driven a car on my own in Belgium before.
