Internal Mobility
The technology department in FINN is huge, almost half of the employees work there. We are approximately 35 teams that have responsibility for different domains. Together we work closely with the Product and UX department to reach the ambitions and goals for the team.
In FINN, we want to give people the opportunity to learn new things and grow as individuals. Sometimes those possibilities exist in another team, domain, or division.
One way we do this is FINN, is to encourage internal mobility.
How to
A developer should feel safe and free to apply to all open positions in FINN. If the open position is also shared externally, we will consider every applicant equally and fair.
When a new position is created in FINN, we share this in our weekly technology letter and on a slack channel for the technology department. If a developer is curious about the new position, the person contacts either his/her manager about the role, or HR. If the role seems to be a good fit, the person applies for the position.
There might be a lot of different reasons for changing teams. Engineering Managers will help the developers with internal mobility in 1:1s, bi-yearly development talks, and developers can always talk with HR.
Meet Simen
One of our employees that have recently moved internally is Simen. He has worked as a developer in FINN for three and a half years. He likes to try out and learn new things and has worked for three different teams. One month ago, he joined Team Travel. Here is a short interview of Simen saying why and what he thinks about internal opportunities in FINN:
Q: In addition to working for three different teams, have you contributed and collaborated with other teams in FINN? If so — how many?
A: To be honest, there are too many to count, from apps all the way down to the infrastructure.
Q: Why did you want to move to another team?
A: The primary motivation for me to switch to a new team was mainly learning a new domain and new assignments. A bonus is to get to know a lot of new colleagues!
Q: How was the process of changing teams?
A: In my case, it was surprisingly easy. I think I started in the new team two weeks after the change was “decided”, with a caveat that I would be available to help my old team if they needed it.
Q: What was important to you when choosing a new team?
A: What was most important to me when choosing a new team was that I could continue to work with the entire tech stack. Additionally, I knew the team was well-established in FINN, which was a plus.
Q: Are you happy (so far) with your new team?
A: Yes! It’s been a lot of fun so far and many new things to learn. It was a bit scary at first to do the whole code review process after the code is out in production, but it works great so far!
Other options
There are many things to learn within the company. Employees with broad knowledge about different domains and technologies are a significant advantage for FINN. Fortunately, internal mobility is not the only option for achieving this.
We have several opportunities as groups and forums focusing on security, frontend, event-driven architecture, and infrastructure. Weekly meetups where we share knowledge and talk about technology in FINN. We also have Hack Days where we experiment, collaborate across teams, and have fun. We have a dedicated Tech Day where everyone comes together for a day of inspiration and workshops.
Additionally, there are many other ways to help build an awesome tech culture, promote FINN to the outside world, and make sure we hire the right people. Everyone in technology is encouraged to help out with this.
It’s all about the people
The most valuable aspect of FINN are the people, and they are what makes FINN. We have a highly competent tech department with many different personalities and backgrounds. By giving developers enough opportunities, we’d hope for happier and motivated employees. In turn the employees might also stay in FINN for a longer time 💙
