Anders as an organization aims to have the bare minimum in the number of organizational tiers for easy & fast communications as well as decision-making. So basically all employees belong to a team which typically holds 4-6 people and is responsible for a bunch of our customers. We have given huge freedom for teams to organize their way of working inside the team but we also have some framework for it which we like to call Anders way of doing or AWOD.

Teemu was voted as Employee of The Year! He is a team coach for the Cool Beans team.

Each team has a team coach to support and help their work in similar manner as Scrum Masters are for Scrum teams. On top of the team coaches, there is management acting in their corresponding roles. That kind of covers the bottom-to-top regarding our production/development and when going sideways we do close co-operation with e.g. Sales and Marketing team regarding events, training and so forth.

Even though Anders is a flat organization, we provide multiple opportunities to grow as a developer. You can build your expertise and specialize to topics you find interesting. We aim to give as much responsibility as person desires and support their growth. Career paths can be for example solution architecture, project management, consultancy or expertise in a specific technology.

As in general Anders works with Agile methodologies containing Scrum, Kanban and, XP (= extreme programming). As said, each developer belongs to a team which defines within themselves and their customers best approaches. There is framework set for it which sets some of the practices like PR process (=Pull Request) which gives requirements for Unit testing, documentation and so forth.

What we have found during the years is that each of our customers has a unique situation regarding what they need and how they want to co-operate in order to accomplish it. This is why we do not want to tie the hands of our development but instead support them in flexibility and understanding that each customer is truly unique.

All of our team coaches have long-term technical experience in various fields and with management it varies – the majority are professionals on technology but others e.g. on the field of economy or social skills instead.

Time tracking as such is set by Finnish law and must be done. We aim to do it easy as possible so that you need to just keep track on your arrival and signing off and let the system keep data of your possible + or – hours. We offer also a remote work possibility and flexible working hours, so one can choose to work from home, summer cottage or e.g. Spain.

Majority of Anders employees do not work on products. Anders does have few own development products but the majority of us work with long-term customer relationships with constant development or now and then projects.

Each team owns a bunch of our customers and we aim to group them to teams so that there is variety in technologies or focus areas (e.g. React, IoT, mobile apps, etc). Naturally, one’s own background affects these and we do also Designers who are supporting several teams depending on their needs.

We aim to always have the same approach to our developers as we have with customers – each of them is unique and while some may want long-term stable product focus other may want more active work rotation and possibility to pick up new challenges – this is something we want to provide by building up teams and grouping them with a bunch of our customers.

Regarding hardware, we have to say that it depends also on your role but as for common things before joining us you’ll get to pick up your preferred laptop & o/s (operating system). Our Hardware responsible has specced out to ensure smooth sailing when it comes to developing.

What we always aim to provide is also electrical tables, comfy sofas and whatsoever to allow you to have comfortable choices to select from on those days you are working at the office.

I would say that there is no better way to see our office than track our Instagram account for seeing pics taken from our offices by our employees. We want that our employees can have funny breaks while working heavily, so the office atmosphere can be quite reckless at times.

– Teemu Selkälä
Project Manager
The Andersian of the year 2018!