I’m one of the two people that were hired first to work for Haltian. I’d left my previous job a couple of weeks before Mika Gröhn’s call about joining the company. The less-than-formal job interview was done at a Teboil service station, and I started my work at Haltian in November 2012.
Before Haltian, I’ve worked as a research assistant at the University of Oulu, and after graduating with an MSc in Mechanical engineering I continued as a research worker for about a year and a half. I then joined Nokia Mobile Phones as a mechanics designer and worked there for almost seven years until 2012. At Haltian my responsibility is to design the mechanics in both client and in-house projects.
All in all, I really like working at Haltian. You get to have your say on what you do and your opinions are valued and asked for. The processes are in place to ensure quality and not make your work less effective, so you can freely exercise your creativity and problem solving skills. And there are always cookies in the coffee room.
Having been here almost from the start, it’s been interesting to see the change from just a small group of people working closely together into a real business. Which is not to say that the collaboration isn’t close nowadays: I know all my team members well, and it’s been a real pleasure getting all of them under the same roof, not to mention the distinct advantage of having HW, SW and mechanics teams working side by side within yelling distance from each other. An interesting factoid: I’m really a leftie although I play guitar and golf like a right-handed person.