Michael Schwarzgorn
@ Trivadis

I like to hear myself talk. That doesn't sound very positive, I know. But it's not about personal vanity. What I mean is: I like to pass on my knowledge, to show – and conversely – be shown new things. For me, that is an important part of the Trivadis culture. There are a lot of highly qualified people here, various islands of know-how that you can tap into in a very uncomplicated way. Or to put it another way: there’s a sense of connection that goes beyond the boundaries of individual departments.

There are no faceless drones flying to work on the production line and simply doing their thing. Here, people work together. I really appreciate that at Trivadis. And speaking of production lines: that's pretty much the opposite of what I experience in my everyday life. If I had to describe my job in one term, it would be "problem solver". I work for many different customers and the result is various small and large tasks – sometimes troubleshooting is called for, sometimes I can take my time. That makes for a very varied and eventful working day.

I am pretty flexible. I see my tasks as blocks, some of which I postpone until the evening, if I have family business to attend to. That's another aspect of my job that I like very much: I can complete and solve my tasks within a limited period of time. That is very satisfying – and gives me a regular sense of achievement.

Purely theoretical work over weeks and months, without having a result in the foreseeable future, has never been my cup of tea. For me, the excitement was always in the implementation. It started in my computer science lessons at school. Back then, everything was still done in the command-line interface. We wrote prank programmes and could immediately observe people’s reactions. They would sit there, type in something and suddenly it said, for example: "Attention, your drive is being formatted." Direct output, that gives me pleasure – not only with pranks, of course.

I hardly take any breaks during the day, as I neither need nor want to. Sure, I have my nervous coffee now and then, but that's about it. I don't find the work tiring, there's always something new. Of course, I have a few fixpoints with fresh air. I like to take my daughter to kindergarten in the morning and walk the dog. This way, I'm sometimes on my feet 50 kilometres a week.

But as I said, usually I like being in front of the computer. Even after work, I sometimes sit at the laptop and play games to take my mind off things. I've been playing “Ultima Online” for years – very old school. I would call it the predecessor of “World of Warcraft”. It's text-based, shared storytelling, so to speak. So here too, I'm pretty much the same as at work, I don't like to be a loner, I like dialogue and exchange.

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