Reiterating, revisiting, getting some distance to come back later with a fresh perspective has a lot of value. And just like this is a story for the second edition of the craftworks culture book, it is also about one of my personal favorite second times: starting a job at craftworks.

Back in the beginning of 2018, I was in the middle of my last year of university and had to find a company to do my 3-month internship at. Even though my major was Media Technology, I had taken an elective course in Computer Vision and was starting to write my thesis around the topic of Machine Learning. Even though I was nowhere near a junior level data scientist my interest was sparked and I set out to find an internship in this field.

Let me tell you that it was not an easy task! But at some point during my increasingly desperate search I found the website of a company that really spoke to me and sent a speculative application for my desired position. A round of interviews and a few weeks later I started my data science internship at craftworks.

I will not go into the details of it now (the gist: it was amazing – I learned a lot) but I want to mention one conversation I had right at the start (maybe it was on the second day?), which stayed with me until now.

When asking my internship buddy if he likes working here he told me something along the lines of “I love working here. Everyday I wake up and I am excited to go to work!”. (Pause here for a minute to let that sink in, because that is a really powerful statement.)

And I believed him – he seemed to genuinely mean it, but at the same time I could not really wrap my head around this idea of actually loving to get up in the morning to go to work – crazy right?

The years went by (I actually almost started a full time job at craftworks, but at the time there were not enough data science projects) and I got another job, which taught me that my field of interest is actually more on the infrastructure, operations, DevOps (call it how you like) side of it all. I was passionate about it, but the sheer excitement of my colleague’s statement never really held true for me.

Naturally, it didn’t take me long to accept when I was offered the position as the first female Data Engineer at craftworks, which came out of the blue. Still chasing that feeling of enthusiasm about my job I started to work at craftworks for the second time.

Were my expectations met? I think you can guess the answer from the tone of this story. And I wouldn’t want to change anything about how things went down. Coming back with all those other experiences and collected knowledge, having something else to bring to the table is so valuable for everyone involved.

But while I was gone, craftworks did not stand still at all. There were and still are many “firsts” for me the second time around: new colleagues, an additional office, many exciting new projects and customers... From time to time someone asks me “So what has changed since then?”.

Besides the obvious differences one major aspect that I noticed actually stayed the same: the way everyone has each other’s backs and creates this trusting environment which as a result lets you step out of your comfort zone to tackle projects in amazing ways.

Even though in IT we say it is never a good thing to stay unchanged, I think in this case it is pretty impressive to experience at first hand how this uncomplicated, direct and value-focused way of getting things done is consistent over the years, even with double the amount of people working together.