All photos: Bartosz Kamiński
“A fun evening for software engineers attracted by the Scandinavian work culture”. That was the promise from 12 Norwegian software companies when inviting for “Norwegian IT Night Tricity” at Sheraton Sopot Hotel on June 8th.
And fun it was!
Especially keynote speaker Pellegrino Riccardi received an overwhelming response from the audience. Being an Italian who has lived 21 years in Norway, culture expert Riccardi made the participants laugh as he described the fun – and not so fun – aspects of Norwegian culture.
12 Norwegian companies
No less than 12 different Norwegian software companies had decided to join forces to organize Norwegian IT Night Tricity. Schibsted Tech Polska was together with Powel the lead organizers of the event.
The companies are in a wide range of industries, such as the media, banking software, energy, online stores, construction, etc. In common: All are looking for software engineers in the Gdansk, Sopot or Gdynia.
These were the companies joining:
- Schibsted Tech Polska
- Powel
- Holte
- Banqsoft
- SocialCee
- SPN Tech
- Evatic
- RiksTV
- Seagull Maritime
- Advisor
- Bluestone
- 24Estore
Managers from 12 Norwegian companies presenting themselves for software engineers in Tricity. Each was given exactly 40 seconds to sell in their company.
A culture of trust
Pellegrino Riccardi gave a very entertaining picture of the Norwegian work culture, using his personal perspective as an Italian who had lived in Norway for 21 years.
He brought up “trust” as one of the strong marks of Norwegian culture. By default, Norwegians tend to trust each other, at least until people are proven not to be trustworthy, he pointed out.
Referring to studies by the Dutch professor Geert Hofstede, he said power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity were three dimensions in which the work culture in Norway and Poland differ significantly.
The audience loved Mr. Riccardi – and on average gave his presentation a rating of 4,92 on a scale from 1 to 5 in an evaluation survey after the event.
Pellegrino Riccardi is a culture expert and motviational speaker.
Technical mini-presentations
The big majority of the audience were software engineers – and programmers from each of the companies were given 5 minutes for a technical mini-presentation. The topics varied from syncing data over APIs, building software for the banking industry to a technical run-down of creating a modern TV service.
From Schibsted Tech Polska team leader Szymon Skórczyński talked about “5 reasons we like Docker”.
The audience gave the highest rating to Marcin Wolnik from Powel, who presented their work with Azure machine learning. He had built a model to predict the outcome of the European Championship in football.
Who will win according to the prediction model?
Spain, claimed Wolnik – leaving his home country Poland slim chances.
“This is of course just bullshit”, responded the very Italian moderator, Pellegrino Riccardi.
Social mingling
70 percent of the audience said they came to the event because they would like to work for a Norwegian company. And during the event they got lots of chances to drink, eat and talk with representatives from the 12 Norwegian companies. Most of the information booths had a steady traffic of curious software engineers.
“This was cool!, ” responded one of the participants in the evaluation survey.
The participants had many opportunities to meet others.
Nine of ten would like to attend more events
In the evaluation survery, 90 percent of the participants said they were interested in taking part in another Norwegian IT Night should the companies choose to organize one more.
More photos from the event
Kacper Siedradzinski and Mariusz Brzeski tell visitors about working at Schibsted Tech Polska.
Adam Boryniec from Powel and John Einar Sandvand from Schibsted Tech Polska welcomed the audience speaking each other´s language.
CEO Stig A. Waagbø had 40 seconds to pitch Schibsted Tech Polska as a great company to work for
Team leader Szymon Skórczyński explained why Docker is used so much in Schibsted Tech Polska
