Why I (decided to) work for Kohera

It’s been over a year now since I started working for Kohera and I wanted to share the reasons why I decided to join them.

Everyone goes through milestones, crossroads in their life, moments to ponder which road to take for the coming years. We do it when we go to high school, when we go to college, deciding on our first job, wife, kids, and so on.
Last year I was in such moment of reflection. My kids being old enough to prefer dad not picking them up right after school, and me being in a job where I felt that my personal ambition and knowledge wasn’t growing at the pace I wanted it to.

Ambition… it was still sizzling inside me. I had no desire to count down the days to my retirement, no! I wanted to learn, feel like I can make a difference and help people!

I decided to have a look and listen on the job market and one of the first companies that contacted me was Kohera. I agreed on a first chat with one of the partners, Koen, where we talked about my reasons for wanting to switch jobs and what we could offer each other. I remember coming home afterwards and feeling excited. A few days later I was asked to have a technical talk with my future team lead, Frederik.

I was a little more nervous this time. After all, you never know what kind of corner-case questions they’ll ask. Once Frederik and I started talking the less it felt like I was being tested. This was just two men sharing their passion about SQL Server. At that moment I made up my mind, this is the company I want to work for! A week later the contract was signed and after a few months I had my first assignment for Kohera.

Fast forward to now…

In the mean time I’ve done several different projects. Performance tuning, migrating to SQL Server 2016, Oracle to SQL assessments, SQL Server audits, … .

I learned more about SQL Server in the past year than I did the 3 years before! And whenever you’re at a loss with a problem there’s a whole team behind you, ready to help. It beats having to be a Google DBA.
But, there’s always a ‘but’, this isn’t what Kohera is all about to be fair. To me, Kohera is a group of young hearted professionals with a huge passion for their work. We’ve done several company/team events and it’s always fun to discuss all the new things we’ve learned, including undocumented features (i.e. bugs). Ok that sounds nerdy, we can be, and are proud of it.

Looking back, am I happy I made the jump? Hell yeah! It’s great, fantastic!

Jan Vandenpanhuyzen (SQL Server Database Administrator)