A Software Engineer’s Onsite Experience in Sweden | Bridge Blog
Going to the onshore location is an exciting prospect for software engineers, and I was recently blessed with this opportunity.
I could travel to Sweden and visit my team with Spot On. I was pretty excited to meet every face and voice in real, whom I used to see and hear on the Skype windows. I went along with my teammates Jiboy and Gokul for this eagerly-awaited trip.
Our First Week
Our first week was at Gothenburg office. We had a good time with Peter, Maria, Simon, Alireza and few others. Adam Gustavsson managed everything for us and made our trip comfortable. We went on an amazing cruise trip and enjoyed music show and seafood. We had a great time with Peter, Sophie, Sandra, Jesica, Adam, Gokul, and Jiboy.
Fun-filled Weeks Ahead
We visited Liseberg and enjoyed Halloween there. It was an amazing opportunity to get a real-time experience of Halloween celebration.
I was also lucky to have the wonderful opportunity to watch ‘Oliver!’ — the opera based on Oliver Twist, at Göteborgsoperan, the famed opera house in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The rest of the days, we spent our time at Jönköping. Jönköping is a city on the shores of Lake Vättern. It’s a beautiful city with many parks and lakeshores. The autumn made the city all the more beautiful with a stunning combo of orange and yellow hues scattered all over.
We visited the island of Visingsö. We spent a relaxing time on this serene island and on the way back we visited Gränna, a classical Swedish town. Gränna is known for its red and white Polkagris stick candy.
Did work too :-)
My team familijen (Swedish name for ‘family’) did a small project. We spent a little overtime a day to finish the Cross-Platform application ‘Candy-Scan’. I had a great time together with my team Niclas, Christor, and Teddy.
I with Andreas Engman and Niclas worked together for Habo, we have been working together for a year. completed almost everything for the production release. And released successfully after a few days.
Jonkoping office is quite big. It was a movie theatre earlier. We had a blasting time with the team there. We went for many activities like music quiz, Pinball, Bule game, and jaw-dropping ice hockey.
I really had a great time there and had loads of fun with Jessica, Teddy, Jonas, Hjalmar, Tommy, Veronica, David, Johan, Malin, Nic, Fedrik, Julia and few others. We enjoyed the time spent with Adam’s family and John’s family.
Work culture and lifestyle
I noticed a few differences in work culture and lifestyle between the team in the Sweden and in India. They start their work early and end it early. This is in stark contrast to the practice here in India: we start and end our work late, eat late, and sleep very late.
Our teammates in Sweden go for long vacations during the summer, whereas we take a few leaves throughout the year. We all discussed a lot about the cultural differences between the two countries. They were curious to know about our ethnic and religious diversities, marriage system, family bonding, etc.
Overall, it was a superb trip. I loved everything related to Sweden; its beautiful chill weather, diverse foods and candies, breath-taking lakeshores, and the amazing people around.
I’m looking forward to working with Spot On and keep the energy and experience I gained from there throughout the rest of my life.
I would like to thank my Sweden team, my colleagues in Bridge Global, and many others who made this trip happen and made it memorable. Thank you wonderful people! You’re awesome :)
Originally published at https://www.bridge-global.com on December 3, 2019.
