My impression about the company

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Gebit Solutions is a middle class company, managed and lead by the founders. The company is well known in their field of expertise, which is development of check-out (or point-of-sale) systems. They have currently around 200 employees, most of them are software developers like me (even if my precise title is “software consultant”). The largest branch is located in Düsseldorf (Germany), followed by Stuttgart (Germany), Berlin (Germany / headquarter) and Lisboa (Portugal). Customers are large retail chains, like Aldi Süd (discounter), dm (drug store), Deichmann (shoe store), spar (food store), Kaufland (food and more), OBI (hardware store) and some more.

As an employee myself, I find the company very generous. Besides a very modern office (I work in Düsseldorf mainly, when I am not doing remote work), free beverages, some cosy places as well as sport equipment and darts, Gebit offers 2 fridays, where we don’t have to work for the projects. These fridays are called Gebit-Friday and meant for personal education. So you can learn a new technology, programming language or even a whole new thing. On top we have 2 company intern conferences (summer and winter) where everybody is invited to a nice 4-star hotel to have a good weekend together. If you want you can bring your family and don’t have to pay anything on top.

So my impression is very positive and I would recommend this company for every software developer who is currently looking for new opportunities.

How I get here

I was living in Düsseldorf with my wife and I was looking around for new opportunities, when a recruiter from Gebit contacted me. It was very fast very clear that I liked the company and their mindset, so I didn’t hesitate to sign a contract and joined them.

What I liked most about the recruitment process was, that it was very fast and very lightweight. I wrote some lines with their recruiter, we found an appointment for a personal interview and had a very nice chat together. Their office looked impressive, very modern and stylish (whereas the offices before where more functional than cosy).

My daily business

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From day 1, I was working for Aldi Süd as a software developer. I found the project confusing, to be honest. At that time 4 product teams where working on the software, but only one of them was a scrum team. The others worked more on a waterfall schema. I thought that in 2018 nobody really works on waterfalls models anymore, but they did. Luckily for me, I had the chance to be part of the second scrum team so I could use my experiences and support the other. I take from that one important thing: You cannot force people to work in an agile environment. Let’s say it this way, it was very tough to motivate the teammates to be responsible for themselves. I remember a situation, where a ticket was missing the release version. But we were already in the process of starting the release. Instead of setting it, we fell into discussions of who is responsible to set the version and why it wasn’t done before. In the end I set the version, even when a high Aldi manager was in charge of the field and as a result, I didn’t get punished; no he thanked me the next day for jumping in.

Changing the project layout took a very long time. Maybe to long for me. I had to change development teams frequently, which lead to different areas I was working on. Unfortunately I couldn’t really deep dive into any specific topic, which made me to a general knowledge bearer, but not really an expert. That brought up frustrations and when in 2022 I had the chance to change positions into the dm (drug store) project, I was very happy to do so.

At dm I found my way into the fiscal team. We are responsible for everything that is related with fiscal requirements. That is sometimes very confusing, because the countries publish laws, but have often no idea what that means I regard to the software we are producing. Sometimes it’s easier, sometimes it’s more difficult.

The funniest thing I know of is a country, that needs to fiscalize receipts. And that includes purchase receipts from the online store. However, the fiscal API is not public, and can only be reached by sending the receipt to the printer. Which seems good enough for in-store purchases, but for online shops not so much. In order to comply with the law, we put a printer inside a cupboard and sending all online purchases to that printer, before the whole logistics starts. The printed receipt isn’t of interest for anybody, so it just get trashed once in a while. Funny, sad, I don’t know.