Trine about robots, her home on wheels and consistent work 🤖🚐💻

Who are you, what are you doing, how did you get to where you are now? Tell me everything!😁

I'm Trine, person of undefined gender, people are free to use whichever pronouns they want. I live in my house on wheels with my pug Billy. I'm a web developer trainee at SinnerSchrader in Berlin. I moved to Berlin about 12 years ago when I was 20 and spent many years in random jobs that paid the bills, but didn't bring me any joy. I never lasted long in any of them. I started an apprenticeship to become a carpenter, I applied to costume design at UDK, I went to Australia for a bit, I worked in several different customer and tech support jobs. I once spent 4 months on a stop motion short film, I think it has reached around 200 views on YouTube so far.

Not a lot of consistency in my past, as you can see, but that changed a few years ago when I joined a one year web development course at DCI in Berlin. This shift from random jobs to something very specific was so exciting and I remember being super motivated by the fact that I could specialize in something without having to go to university for several years.

After finishing the course I joined SinnerSchrader in June 2020. I loved it from day one, everything was new to me and I was learning so much every day.

But we were also in the middle of a pandemic. I still lived in a flat in Berlin back then, but I was struggling more and more with all the restrictions and very limited social life. So in September last year I bought a van with "Kofferaufbau". With tons of support and understanding from work, friends and family I was able to take three months off work to go to my dad's place where him and I built my house on wheels.

My work is now the consistent thing in my life and my house is moving all the time. I think this was a healthy shift.

Sounds like you really mastered work-life-balance!😁 What do you like most about your job?

It's such a cliché, but I love solving problems! I don't know a better way to describe it. When I need to build something it can be a struggle to break it into smaller pieces, but once everything has it's own frame I can lose myself for hours, just solving one problem after the other. And I also love that technology keeps evolving which means there will always be new things to learn. This motivates me a lot. I want my life to be an adventure and if I'm able to have a job that's also an adventure - I couldn't ask for more :)

Sounds dreamy. But there have to be challenges, too, right? What has been the biggest challenge so far and how did you face it?

That I sometimes lose overview! I've learned how important it is to me, that things are clearly defined. I get very distracted if there are lots of vaguely defined goals, tasks, expectations etc, it makes me feel overwhelmed and confused. I've learned that, if it's not already provided in e.g. subtasks, I have to start everything with setting up a "frame", something that helps me understand where my focus should be. If it's a task at work and the description isn't completely clear to me, I start out by defining my own frame. I also try to use this to structure my days, which of course isn't always possible due to team work, meetings etc. But this has helped me to get less overwhelmed.

How do you envision your future? Do you have a plan or are you more relaxed about everything to come?

This is my vision: The robots have become even more advanced and are taking over many of the human tasks. This at first leads to (even) more unemployment, but luckily the humans soon realize that this is an opportunity to reduce the work hours for everybody. Unemployment falls, well-being rises. Everybody is happy. Besides that I don't really have any plans, I don't even know where I will be living next week. I only know that I have found a job that makes me happy and that I want to continue improving and learning new skills.

Interesting vison! Tell me, if you could choose to do anything you like for a living, what would it be?

Here's another cliché: this, this is my dream job.

I'm so happy with my colleagues, the culture and of course the job itself. But if this is too boring, here's my alternative:
I would like to befriend a very rich person who doesn't have any ideas. I have many ideas, but unfortunately not enough resources to make them all happen. So if my new friend would grant me access to their bank account, I would also like to do that for a living.