Marieke’s first 8 months at Tropos

To start my journey as a junior data engineer, Tropos gave me a safe environment to develop my skills. For the onboarding process — and even longer than that — I got a buddy assigned. Through Niels’ tips & tricks, I quickly understood how Tropos puts into practice what I needed to learn during my onboarding.

So it’s not just about digesting knowledge and earning badges & certificates. In my opinion, you learn the most by doing. After just two months, I was able to contribute to projects. First, I started working with more experienced colleagues on an internal R&D project. We developed a prototype product that would allow customers to use Snowflake easier and faster. During these two months, I dove into the world of ‘Infrastructure as Code’ with Terraform. I hadn’t come across this yet and it definitely sparked my interest!

“I learned how it feels to work for a client.”

My next endeavor involved collaborating with a colleague on a validation process for an American-based manufacturer. This involved writing Python scripts and setting up GitHub Actions to ensure code reliability and adherence to data conventions. In this project, I got my first work experience with Python, something that has been on my wish list for a long time. I also learned how it feels to work for a client. As that was still new for me, it was nice to have an approachable team leader like Bob, to whom I could go with my questions and concerns. He is like a lifejacket in the (sometimes wild) waters of consultancy.

“We have a lot of variety in our work.”

I was then able to start on a long-term contract in the automotive sector. Here, I was integrated into a team assembled by the client itself with internal employees and consultants. Our team is called ‘the Manufacturing Data Hub’ and we create global digital solutions. We work with use cases that change every 3 months. Therefore, we have a lot of variety in our work. Still, the basis of what we do is always dbt and Snowflake (or writing SQL). For example, in the first use case, we removed the logic in Power BI reports and converted them to dbt for the sake of scalability and efficiency of the analytics teams. In my second use case, the business wants to measure stock inventory and it is up to us to design and build these measurements together with the business. While the first case is quite technical (writing SQL scripts), the second one combines technical, business and even statistical aspects (before writing SQL, we need to know how to make a statistically correct calculation for what the business wants to measure).

“It comes down to your technical and social skills to tackle challenges.”

I like that I have learned so much in such a short time. What I learned in the onboarding was mainly technical (AWS Cloud, Snowflake, dbt, SQL, etc.). Going into real projects, I gained more technical skills but also soft skills. How do you manage the expectations of your client? How do you communicate organized, assertively, and friendly towards your client? How do you change your strategy when things don’t go as expected? In projects, they don’t give you a list of perfectly defined requirements to build your solution (as I remember my tasks in university). The reality is more vague and it comes down to your technical and social skills to tackle these challenges.

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