What I love about DevOps is that in the end, it's all about people.

We are Polar Squad. In this blog series, we introduce the people of our amazing company. Next in line is Tuomas!

Tell us a bit about yourself and your background?

I’m Tuomas, originally employee number 7 of Polar Squad. I was the first one whose main task was not to do DevOps for our clients but to focus on internal stuff making Polar Squad the best DevOps company.

Originally my main tasks were to ensure that we have people who do DevOps and that we have clients who need DevOps. I still do these things, but as the company has developed, my priority has shifted into ensuring that we have satisfied people and satisfied clients.

When I’m off-squad, my life mostly consists of family time (two small kids and a wife), and all kinds of sports that cause different types of physical pain, with or without a ball.

What was the path that led you to become a Squad member?

Fifteen years ago I thought I’d be an engineer when I grow up (well, I do have a degree), but after my studies, I ended up doing business consulting. After a few years of helping B2B companies in sales and marketing, I had a somewhat good understanding of different business areas. 

I concluded that the software business was the one with the most growth potential and the one where employees have the most power – meaning that companies need to do some extra effort in keeping their employees happy.

So, about a decade ago I started my career in the world of IT consulting, and since then I’ve been working as an interpreter between regular people and IT people. This mainly means sales, marketing, productization, and all kinds of back-office operations.

Which tools do you like to use in your work?

On top of spamming our employees by Slack and clients by email, I guess my main tools are Google Sheets and Google Slides. 

I love that you can solve so many things with numbers; therefore Google Sheets is open in multiple tabs on my computer at any given time. And to get the audience (whether that is our employees, our clients, or potential future clients) to understand the information of the data, I use Google Slides to present it, hopefully with some nice colors and pictures.

What sets Polar Squad apart from other companies you've worked in?

A human touch in everything we do.

As a business-minded person, it’s been wonderful and educational to see that we pretty much always think about our people before profit. The best part is that I believe the world has developed so much, that in the long run, our earnings will be way larger than the companies' with a traditional or should I say old fashioned business-first mindset.

How would you describe the culture in PS? How can you maintain a company-wide culture when most employees work long-term with different clients? Would you like to give us detailed examples of what the culture is about in Polar Squad?

Maybe the best way to describe our culture is that we always have our values (our people, empathy, ambition) in mind when we work and make decisions. They are not just empty words to us but real guidelines for our daily work.

I see them realizing every day in client projects and internal meetings; solving problems together; constantly doing things better; accepting failure and learning from them; breaking silos instead of creating them; trying to understand other’s opinions; common goal instead of sub-optimizing; long-term before short-term; people before tech; honest and direct opinions instead of stating what others want to hear.

Tell us about your day-to-day routines?

Probably half of my time goes to communication, or preparing communication, with and to our employees, clients, and partners. This includes meeting people and sending all kinds of messages with different tools, and also the old style: talking face-to-face and on the phone.

The other half of my time is split into two parts; monthly or weekly recurring tasks (including reporting, finances, HR, sales, productization, feedback, and company development); and long-term strategic planning.

What kind of technical challenges do you meet at your work?

What I’ve learned is that tech always fails; we need to focus on keeping it working longer. 

My personal tech challenges are simpler than the ones our DevOps pros have; my computer is slow because I have so many tabs open, and the wifi fails too often.

You look at DevOps from a different angle than most of the squad. How do you see the field of DevOps overall?

What I love about DevOps is that in the end, it is all about people. 

Yes, tech is a big part of DevOps, but there’s much more to it. Benefits come when people get to focus on meaningful things and work together towards a common goal.

With DevOps, IT professionals understand each other and their customers better. By automating the boring stuff and getting constant feedback they do less waste and focus on adding value and solving real problems. And because of this, their customers don’t need to complain about inadequate IT solutions, but get things done and focus on their own duties. 

These things make me believe that my work is meaningful, too.