A Rewarding Change of Direction

Two IT pros share what took them from the classroom to Mutual of Omaha.

The path to becoming an IT professional doesn’t always follow a straight line from school to work. Sometimes it twists and turns. The important thing is to find meaningful work that allows us to learn, grow and do what we love.

Alec Sorensen and Dan Bruder are cases in point. Sorensen studied math in college and became a high school math teacher. Bruder got a degree in physics and taught for a couple of years. Now they’re both software engineers at Mutual of Omaha.

“Teaching wasn’t what I thought it would be for me,” said Sorensen. “When I realized that, I was at a crossroads. I decided a master’s in data analytics would be a good way to apply my math skills to computers.”

Sorensen then went to work for a sports analytics startup.

“Like most startups, it was all ‘hands on deck’, and I found myself getting pulled into software engineering. I started coding every day and loved it,” he said.

That experience led him to Mutual of Omaha where he is an engineer on a team that works with 401(k) applications.

After teaching, Bruder took a job with an insurance company in Michigan where he was a mainframe COBOL developer. He then transitioned to a mix of COBOL and Java development.

“I relocated to Madison, Wisconsin, and left the company after nine years,” said Bruder. “After a year sabbatical, I started looking for a job that offered a remote work option. That’s when I found Mutual.”

A Typical Day

For both developers, a typical day starts with a quick check of email and chat to see if there were any issues during overnight processing. If so, they’ll jump in to help resolve them. That’s followed by a short standup meeting where the team reviews what they did the day before and discusses what they plan to do today. They’ll also bring up any impediments that may be keeping them from making progress.

Next, they’ll pick up work where they left off the day before. Most teams use Agile/SAFe techniques to organize work into “features” to be delivered in a three-month program increment and “stories” that break down the work into manageable chunks that can be completed in a three-week iteration. Some stories involve coding in Java and fixing bugs identified by team testers. Others are research stories for analyzing and investigating how to approach future work. The work on both teams is a mix of supporting existing apps and modernizing older apps to use a microservices architecture.

Spring framework is used in Java for back-end development and JavaScript and React for the front end. Both teams are running some apps and targeting new development in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Sorensen and Bruder give kudos to their respective teams for their willingness to help.

“We do a lot of collaborating,” Sorensen said. “There’s never a moment when I’m stuck on a problem and the team isn’t there to support me.”

“We work together to troubleshoot,” said Bruder. “If someone new is working on a high-priority feature that needs to be done fast, more experienced team members will guide them.”

Challenges

Both developers agree the most challenging days are the ones — thankfully rare — when there are production problems.

“Those days can get a little long – lots of work to troubleshoot, make and test code changes and redeploy,” Sorenson said.

Bruder recently worked on a production issue where the developer with the most expertise was on vacation.

“We do our best not to call people when they are out of the office,” he said. “I worked with our clients and business analysts to triage the issue.”

Rewards

Sorensen was emphatic about the most rewarding part of his job. For him, it’s “Team Demo Day” at the end of each Agile iteration.

“I love those moments when we can show what we’ve accomplished in three weeks,” Sorenson said. “Recently I was given the opportunity to showcase the work the Java developers had been doing. The feedback our business partners shared with us was a huge motivation boost. It makes all the effort worth it.”

For Bruder, the opportunity to improve the documentation his team needs for production support is particularly rewarding.

“We didn’t have a centralized view of support procedures and ways to resolve issues, so I created that and would like to do more. If you keep it streamlined, documentation is useful, maintainable and makes everybody’s job a little easier,” he said.

Work-Life Balance

Both Bruder and Sorensen appreciate that when they sign off, they’re usually done for the day.

“Last week it was my turn to be primary on-call,” Bruder said. “I was responsible for handling issues and ad hoc requests during the day and after hours. Since the whole team takes a turn, I’m only on call once about every eight weeks.”

For Sorensen, a healthy work-life balance at Mutual is a blessing.

“I worked for a small startup before coming to Mutual. I was on call 24/7 and worked most weekends. I made the transition to Mutual about the time my daughter was born. Work-life balance is huge for me. I love having time with my family,” he said.