Dev interviews: True seniority comes with experience, not age

The tales of Damir Muhović and Aleš Vaupotič, our senior developers, unravel like episodes in a TV series. We asked them about their decades-long careers, how they have come to love programming and how they see seniority in their line of work.

It all started in the supportive households they grew up in, in the early days of the digital revolution. Learning software was not as accessible as today. Knowledge and information were scarce, and the outbreak of Yugoslav wars of the 1990s didn’t make things easier.

Damir is a solution architect, a team leader and a product owner at Infosit. Born in Tuzla, he moved to Croatia when he was 12. He has been seriously engaged in programming for 24 years. Aleš is our senior front-end developer and consultant, with his career spanning 35+ years. Born and raised in Slovenia, he started working as a programmer in the 80s.

Damir: When your mom is programming, and you watch her working

Damir was good at programming from an early age.

- I wrote my first program before I knew all the letters of the alphabet. My mom is a programmer. I picked things up as I watched her working. At one point I realized that I understood it.

He was good at sports, and he went to an electrical engineering high school. But programming remained a constant, a parallel track of his life. - It is something I've always been good at and something that's always been there for me.

- In the 80s, few people saw programming as something you can make a living out of. In 1991, on our way back from Belgrade, we were stopped by a heavily armed squad. They searched our car. When they saw we had a computer, they asked: "What could you possibly need the computer for? Can’t you see the war is coming?” It turned out the computer wasn’t a bad investment. My mom wrote the first accounting program on it, and my parents then used it in their company.

In high school, he had a computer with a professional scanner and other fancy additions. It cost a fortune. His dad believed it was important for Damir to learn and practice programming. Damir admits he also used the machine to forge bus tickets; the “earnings” bought him gas for his first car.

- In the end, my dad was right: you can make a living out of computers, he concludes.

When he got his first job as a programmer in 2001, he saw what it truly was. In his words, it was more than research and development.

- I saw I could be very creative, in a kind of mathematical, geeky way. Once you understand how things work, you can say you are a programmer. Learning a programming language is the easy part.

Aleš: Legos, trains, electricity, automation

For Aleš, things took their turn early, too. A curious child, he was drawn to programming through automation. As a boy, he played with legos and trains, assembling railways and setting switches. Then he found a way to automate the switches with the help of electricity.

- Growing up, I always had technical people around. My dad was an electrical engineer, he worked at a hydroelectric power plant. My mom worked as an administrator, so we had a typewriter at home. I used to type on that machine a lot.

With the advent of computers, the power plant's protection system began to be increasingly automated. He was in contact with all that through his dad.

- At 14 I had a calculator that I could program. It had some serious functions. You could input things and get the output in the tenth of a second. The instant result was fascinating.

When programmers wore lab coats

When he started working in the second half of the 80s, he was still in high school. He came to work in a white lab coat. Not many people were involved in programming, which meant you had nobody to learn from.

- We learned from books, and they were difficult to find. We got them from abroad. I think that at one time I was the best client of Mladinska knjiga publishing house. I saw how much programming could help people. When you see it in practice, it brings satisfaction. You could call it reward, or even dopamine.

- I went to electrical engineering school in the morning and programmed in the afternoon. At 18, I was already working on systems for travel agencies. Later, I worked a lot across the former Yugoslavia, but also throughout Europe. When the web appeared, I started creating e-commerce sites very early on. I gained lots of experience in e-commerce and integrations. Later on, I reached positions where I had more influence on architecture. I was often in the role of team lead, CTO and others, he said.

Seniority takes time and effort, and it is not romantic

As you grow in seniority, your knowledge will expand. So will your ability to understand the big picture and what customers need. You also get better at organization and management. All this takes time and effort, and relevant experience.

- You are paid better, but you have greater - and broader - responsibility. You start talking to clients, working with management. You need a bigger skill set. Also, you get to lead junior developers. To do that well, you need understanding (and patience). Talking to a computer is one thing. Making your seniority available to your colleagues, company and business is completely different. For sure you get better at communication and presentation. You learn how to host a meeting that will be useful. How to say no in the right way, and lots of other things, Damir explained.

He says that so far he worked in two types of companies - those that actively market products (proactive) and those that react to market needs (reactive).

- I was lucky that my first job was in a proactive company. I was surrounded by engineers and less by management. I progressed to a senior position because only seniors worked there. When you have such people and their knowledge around, you cannot fail, Damir believes.

- I still like to program. It is a craft that needs to be trained. But being a senior is not just programming, and it can’t be romantic. You cannot say - let's build something as best as we can! You need to be able to deliver, he concluded.

You need to be happy with yourself, to have good results at work

If he could influence 1 million people, Aleš would like them to think about themselves. Are they truly happy with their job?

- After so many years in the workforce, I realized that we often focus on our careers so much that we forget about ourselves. I was lucky to find what I wanted to do at 12. But I see a lot of people around me doing work they don't like. You need to think about how a career decision will affect you and find a way to reach satisfaction. You have to be happy with yourself in order to have good results at work, said Aleš.

Advocating for the client

He adds that he likes programming more than anything.

- I am one of those people who turn on the computer before the coffee machine. That motivation has remained with me to this day. I am also motivated by the fact that I can transfer my experience to younger colleagues. Right now I am focused on the frontend, I worry about how our products will look. Over the course of my career I worked in various positions. No matter what and where I work, I always advocate for the client. I want the product to be of high quality, as if we were all seniors. I want the client to get the best possible solution and to be satisfied, Aleš explained.

Valuing autonomy and no blame culture

What has attracted and kept him at Infosit is a particular culture and working environment. He’s been with the company for two years now.

- What I value a lot when looking for a new environment or a position is autonomy. It is important that management has confidence in me and my decisions. Micromanagement absolutely does not exist here. Also, it is important that the team is open to simple solutions. And that I am allowed to make mistakes. I have made mistakes worth a million euros in my life - the key thing is to learn from them and move on stronger.

- There are many good things in Infosit, and new colleagues can contribute a lot. Some very proactive people have joined us recently, and that is great.

What the future holds: Seniors are the engine

Aleš sees plenty of opportunities in the future; Damir sees senior developers as drivers of innovation.

- The digital world will keep expanding at a high speed. With its reputation and specialization in hospitality, Infosit is in a very good place. It can keep growing on advanced tech solutions, according to Aleš.

- Infosit is a specific environment, the climate is open to innovation. In this sense, seniors are the ones who can do quality R&D and propose ideas for new products. They can create solutions and plan the implementation of novelties that fit with market needs. Seniors have experience; they know what can and cannot be done. They are the engine of a high-performing software company, concluded Damir.