Thank You Nordnet, For Everything

2024, January 3rd. Sitting in the Nordnet reception with an excitement inside of me. This was gonna be my first day at Nordnet! A prestigious bank! I mean what an opportunity. Mind you it was gonna be a master thesis, but still! SOOOO COOOL! A familiar face enters the room. My manager Jonas greets me in the warmest way: "Hello Jonas! Ready to get going?" I can only describe the first day as a blast! It almost got tiring after a while meeting all of the cool and amazing people. And that was what really stood out to me. The culture. I fell in love with Nordnet immediately.

And this would be a recurrent theme when it comes to working at Nordnet. The feeling of belonging to something, the feeling of being important, the feeling of you actually mattering. That is something I always felt at Nordnet.

What made you feel that way Jonas?

That is what I want to try my best at putting into words. The reason that Nordnet is a workplace that I will cherish for the rest of my life.

Work Is More Than Just a Workplace

Working at Nordnet, I felt a genuine happiness going to work each day and hanging out with my awesome colleagues! When I started working there full time things actually got even better! Because now I would also be working together with the team compared to doing my own master thesis. Which made it feel like contributing to something bigger. And that feeling of contributing to something bigger? That is what made Nordnet more than just a workplace for me.

Teamwork Makes Dreamwork!

Nordnet is a teamwork first workplace. Collaborating is something that is heavily encouraged. Nordnet tech was divided into minor teams of 5-7 people. In these teams we got to decide a lot together about how we wanted to work. Did we want to work more remotely? Did we want to be in the office a lot? Did we want to work more with mob programming? This really meant that you were a part of a real team! Not just a team on paper but a team where you actually contributed to something. And this is something I feel is very important.

So what is mob programming? Well, it is when you work together in a group and have one person coding in front of one computer. "Jonas, WTF%#!! That is super inefficient!" Well hear me out, because yes it might not produce as much code. But it produces higher quality code, improves collaboration and it is just in general such a fun way of working. 10/10 would totally recommend it.

If You Have Ideas, You Actually Get Heard!

"Oh I like that book! Can I borrow it?" I said while pointing at the book standing on the shelf. "Absolutely!" Alexander said. Then after pondering for a while he said "What if we had an actual library at Nordnet?" Fast forward to today, and I have been the librarian for the Nordnet tech library for one year! This is just one example of thousands of times where if you have an actual idea, it can become a reality! Of course, not every idea gets implemented, but you get the gist of it. Ideas are very much welcomed, not shut down.

Here is a dump of some of the stupid ideas I have had that actually became something!

Treasure hunt for new recruits: I created a treasure hunt for new recruits where they got to learn about the office by actually hunting treasure 🙂

The library: You can borrow cool books!

Thesis presentations: I acted as a supervisor for some master thesis workers and got the idea that it would be fun if they shared their progress and stuff 🙂

Solve the Problem, Don't Try to Blame

Does this mean that there were never problems when working at Nordnet? Of course not! Problems are inevitable, however the way they were solved at Nordnet was always so fantastic and inspirational.

I still remember the first time a bigger problem arose when I was still new to Nordnet. What was so impressive to see was the fact that not one second was wasted pointing fingers. All the resources and attention was put on solving the problem instead. This is something I truly loved about Nordnet because it is a very proactive approach. Not the reactive "Why did you cause this mess!" Instead the proactive "Let's solve this mess!"

Office, Office, Office!

Are you an office lover? Well then fear not friends, because Nordnet is the place for you! I'm a huuuuuge office lover and I was there almost every day! Gonna miss it ;(

FIKAAAAAAAAA

Ok here comes the most important part. Nordnet has a weekly fika. BUT NOT JUST ONE, TWOOOO FIKAS EACH WEEK?!?! Every Tuesday and Thursday. I'm not kidding. This is real. This is almost like heaven, I know I know.

There are a million other things I could bring up but unfortunately that would take 10000 years. So if you really need to know more, I guess we will just have to take a fika together friend!

To the people from my teams. Thank you, I will miss you guys ❤️

Nordnet, you gave me so much more than a job. You gave me a place where I actually wanted to be every single day. And that is pretty rare.

Nordnet Highlights

Thank you Nordnet for everything ❤️