Sometimes I get asked to tell a bit how it is working with SAP software at Pearl. It actually happens so frequently that I decided to write about it because it can't be explained in a couple words. Don't worry I'll include some photos to make it easier for you. :)
Tl;dr - it is totally worth it.
What is Pearl?
A bit of history
Pearl Consulting is an IT company that was founded more than 10 years ago in Oslo, Norway and it almost entirely focuses around SAP ecosystem. Oslo office currently has about 60 employees. In 2018 another office in Norway was opened at Sandefjord.
Some 5+ years ago local branch in Riga, Latvia was started by one of the co-founders of Norwegian Pearl, who happened to be one of the founders of another SAP consultant company branch in Latvia. Office in Riga has 40+ employees.
Office life in 2017:
About a year ago branch in Kiev, Ukraine was opened. I could be wrong but I think there are 10 to 20 employees in Kiev and it is growing.
And this year (2018) for monitoring purposes office in Singapore was opened, where monitoring personnel from Oslo and Riga temporarily go with their families, for periods of one month or so to provide support when everyone in other geographical areas is sleeping. Also not a bad option if you want to escape the cold northern weather during winter.
Culture
Being a relatively small company like Pearl has it's benefits. There is no huge pyramid structure where no one really knows what is going on and there are almost no bureaucratic problems. If you want to, you can reach out to anyone in the company and have a talk. You usually notice managers only when you forget to book time spent on projects and during personal development talks twice a year. The rest of the time you mostly focus on working with your project's team.
At the same time Pearl is not some small startup where people burn investor money without consequences, so positive work attitude is crucial and expected. People at Pearl are usually very helpful and juniors get up to speed quite fast.
But as many people know, working too hard can make you burn out so there is time to relax as well. While in Riga we don't currently have the coolest office to take a 5 minute break comfortably (some say it is being worked on), there is always someone willing to play Foosball while "it's compiling" and kitchen area has plenty of cookies, bananas, coffee, tea and what not.
Pearl events
Pearl events are important part of internal company culture that bring multiple benefits so I'll list and briefly go over them.
Technical spaces
Once a month we organize "technical spaces"'- local informal internal knowledge exchange lectures with free beer, snacks and fun optional ranked quiz at the end. I'm unsure if this should be called an event but it is usually both fun and informative. Attending this event is optional.
One of the first technical spaces in 2016:
As leaders of Pearl remind us each year during Kick-off events -
"We work hard but party harder."
And that is not an understatement. Events at pearl are usually well organized and usually there is something for everyone.
Dinner at Pearl
Each month we have a local internal meeting where information about new sales cases, projects, employees and financial results are shared with the whole Pearl team, and about once a quarter after those meetings we have informal dinner at some nice restaurant or cool bar that tends to end at the dawn of next day. This event is optional.
A few photos from some smaller local events:
Christmas party
Christmas party is the only event that you visit with your other half and it is usually held at some fancy location. Great food, gifts, special prizes for special or fun achievements (including the previously mentioned quiz), entertainment, dances till the last visitor. This event is optional but you would be crazy to skip it.
Local Kick-off
Local kickoff happens at the end of the summer and is a two day event somewhere outside of capital city. It usually consists of shorter official part, outdoors activities and party afterwards. Second day continues with some more outdoors activities, this time less energy consuming for obvious reasons. This event is mandatory since it includes the official part.
Some photos from local kick-offs:
Ski event
Norwegians are big skiers so global Pearl ski event is held once a year (with some exceptions). It usually happens in one of the ski resorts in Norway and is a two day event with the main focus on skiing and the crazy Norwegian after-ski afterwards. I started learning how to ski because of this event and now I like it a lot. This is optional event but nice one if you like skiing or snowboarding.
Some photos from Pearl Ski events:
Global kick-off abroad
Every year has to start with great unforgettable experience and this is why global kick-off usually happens at the beginning of January, with only exception being South-Africa kick-off in 2016 that happened in March to celebrate Pearl's 10 year anniversary.
Global kick-off is both educational and entertaining event that runs for 3 days in some foreign country. Prior to kick-off almost no one knows each year's destination and cleverly made riddles are sent out to employees to guess the location. First one to guess the location correctly usually gets best available apartments in the hotel where we are staying and some nice bottle to share with others or keep for oneself.
Kick-off also holds a conference on second day with some external speaker, yearly result and goal announcements and attendee presentations about various technologies and topics. It is usually educational, informative and entertaining.
Pearl Awards night in South Africa:
There are also multiple team building activities that allow getting to know our colleagues from other offices a bit better and it ends with fancy dinner and party.
Kick-off is mandatory event.
Pearl Kick-off in South Africa 2016:
Pearl kick-off in Chamonix, France, 2017:
Pearl Kick-off in Ghent, Belgium, 2015:
Pearl Kick-off in Sitges, Spain, 2018:
More events
Besides regular Pearl events there are also some irregular ones.
Sometimes successfully finished projects are celebrated with a dinner and some activity. First one for starting the project is usually paid by Pearl but closing party by customer. In the previous project I worked in we went to mini-golf bar with customer in Oslo and then to dinner.
And last year Pearl won prize from SAP for being best partner in Norway. We went to race track and were driven around with crazy expensive cars.
Sports
Pearl pays for indoor beach volleyball field once a week.
And Pearl also sponsors participation in some other sports events.
Projects
While there are many entertaining events, there is also some serious work to be done at Pearl. And SAP is no walk in a park. It is one of the oldest enterprise systems in the world used by some of the largest and most complex companies in the world. SAP products have very expensive licenses and it has closed ecosystem.
There aren't many large companies in Latvia that could afford running SAP ERP or Hybris and this is one of the reasons why Pearl has projects mostly in wealthier foreign countries, and that can require traveling from time to time.
Lately Pearl has been expanding outside of Norway and has projects also in Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Canada, Lithuania and Latvia.
Travel
If you have ever experienced business travel, you know it is not a vacation, and it can be quite tiresome if it happens frequently, especially if it is not a single day trip. Luckily though most of us at Pearl Riga don't have to travel that much, unless you really want to. Traveling is usually required during start and end of the project and sometimes in between the sprints, or to plan some bigger change to project in support phase. Everything in between can be usually done using e-mail, phone and Skype/Slack conferencing.
I personally have to travel only a few times a year, with about 1 month per year of regular weekly visits, during planning of new project. Developers who don't want to be involved in architecture planning travel less and project managers have to travel a bit more but it's not that bad.
Some images from trips to Oslo:
Work
When we say "SAP developer", we usually talk about people who work with the older SAP systems using SAP's ABAP programming language. It is used mostly in backend systems that are not directly exposed to public web.
While we have multiple SAP developers in Riga office, most of the Riga team is made up of Java developers working with SAP's bought e-commerce platform Hybris. Since it was a bought product, SAP is in the process of renaming it to suit their marketing needs a bit better. :)
I can't speak much about ABAP developers but with Hybris our daily job mostly consists of planning, developing and testing various features or fixes and of course communicating with clients when necessary.
Development project teams are usually made of less than 10 to 15 people and support projects have maybe a couple of developers active on them.
We also have good monitoring team that can do some common tasks if something breaks and notify us if anything unexpected happens. The key is having good monitoring setup and we do monitor all of the key processes in each project.
Our Java developer team has well documented guidelines, all of the new projects utilize automated builds and testing for pull requests and more. And in our projects we mostly use variation of Scrum approach.
There are all kinds of nice little things that I won't go into details, but in general we do modern software development and occasionally we are challenged by additional universally known problems, like lack of time, resources, etc.
Professional growth
And while the development part itself is quite standard and easily approachable, we are constantly changing and pushing our approach to development and operations further, polishing it more and more. As previously explained - there is no large corporation that directly dictates some rules (aside from SAP) on how to develop. We try something new, if it works - great, if it doesn't - we don't have to stick to it. Good and bad findings are afterwards talked about during Technical Spaces.
One of my favorite reasons why working at Pearl is such a good thing is because people are given opportunity to learn new things if only they wish to. As I previously wrote, SAP is used by large companies, and closely participating in projects for these companies can provide experience and outlook that you can't get while developing some small app or website. And since new projects are starting every year or couple of years, a lot of different things can be learned.
Basically it is both challenging and rewarding to work at pearl.
From SAP Hybris Summit in 2017:
Bonuses
And speaking of rewards - Pearl is a company that takes care of it's employees. Yes, it is 2018 when I write this, and more and more companies in Latvia are starting to offer similar benefits but Pearl was great also 4 years ago when I joined and probably long before that.
Some bonuses (in no particular order):
- top of the line work laptop;
- top of the line phone;
- paid phone bills;
- health insurance;
- paid parking;
- paid taxi after events and travel;
- all of the previously mentioned events fully paid by company;
- all of the taxes paid;
- kitchen full of cookies and other good stuff;
- ability to work from home when needed as long as it's not abused;
- valuable gift of choice after getting married and after child birth;
- salary bonuses every 6 months.
Summary
Pearl is lead by great people, Pearl has good people and Pearl has fantastic culture.