{"id":2107,"date":"2021-05-06T13:53:24","date_gmt":"2021-05-06T12:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/?p=2107"},"modified":"2023-01-18T14:04:21","modified_gmt":"2023-01-18T14:04:21","slug":"interview-with-denise-nepraunig-ios-develope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/?p=2107","title":{"rendered":"From Mastering SAP to Controlling Cars with a Phone: Interview with Denise Nepraunig, iOS Dev"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interview with Denise Nepraunig, a Berlin-based iOS developer who decided to pursue her passion for Apple after 13 years in the SAP <\/a>ecosystem. She\u2019s now a Swift and iOS dev at CARIAD<\/a>, the Volkswagen Group\u2019s automotive software development division. This is what she did, why she did it, and how you can do it too.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

? Subscribe to the podcast<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Interview with Denise Nepraunig<\/h2>\n

You worked with SAP for many years. Why the change in
\ncareer focus?<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

I started out within the SAP ecosystem about 13 years ago, working for an SAP customer, then I had a short stop at an SAP consultancy and, finally, I ended up at SAP itself. The thing was that SAP is really great to work with, and it also pays very well to have SAP skills. But they are really specialised, so it can be hard to transfer them to another company or environment. It\u2019s also hard in terms of resources. Then. things like blog posts or stack overflow questions, they are hard to get by. <\/p>\n

Plus, after doing SAP stuff for so long, I really wanted to break free from all of it and diversify my skillset so that I could work anywhere. The last two or three years at the company, I had the chance to get started with some iOS development, and I found it really exciting, I loved it. <\/p>\n

So, I\u2019m an Apple fangirl, and I thought writing your own apps for the platform was really cool. Swift makes it a lot easier than Objective-C, with which I had failed in the past. But at SAP we were still using our own frameworks within iOS and stuff like that, so I felt a bit stuck inside this ecosystem. <\/p>\n

Then I had the opportunity to interview at Volkswagen, and I saw that they hadn\u2019t created too much stuff for iOS yet. And It was a really good opportunity for me. I joined last December, so I\u2019m a few months in. To be honest, it was quite scary to leave my extensive SAP experience and network behind, but so far I don\u2019t regret it a single bit.<\/p>\n

Now I am working on apps with which you can remotely control car features
\nlike climatization. It’s also really fascinating to have hardware involved. At
\nSAP you just controlled software or business processes and now you can control a
\ncar. It\u2019s like being a kid with a remote-controlled car, but with a real car
\ninstead.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

So, you basically went from writing code for B2B
\napplications to doing it in the B2C space? What are the biggest differences you
\nhave noticed?<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

For one thing, and in my case, you’re much more closely connected to the
\ncustomer, and your sprint and your tasks inside the sprint can change very
\nquickly depending on what problems arise or the feedback on the App Store. <\/p>\n

Also, I feel more connected to my work. You directly know the end-users, everybody in your everyday life has experience with cars, but hardly anyone else has experience with ERP systems. Volkswagen also has a lot more customers. It has a whole different scale than SAP. Some projects I worked on, yeah \u2013 it’s really exciting. I was looking exactly for this. <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

What\u2019s the best career advice you have ever been
\ngiven?<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

The best piece of advice has definitely been that I should network a lot.
\nAnd that was really important when joining a
\nbig company like SAP. There are just so many different things which you are
\ndependent on, whether it is a cloud platform, or a web framework, or stuff
\ninside SAP itself… You need to know people, and it helps tremendously if you
\nknow the right person. And that’s also true in terms of careers. For example, if
\nyou know someone in another department, you can easily get a job there just
\nbecause you know the person.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\"Connect<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

There are also some cool events
\nthat SAP had, where I got the chance to be a speaker at and so on. So this was
\na tremendous experience inside the SAP family. My first manager at SAP actively
\nsupported me in this process, encouraging me to travel to conferences and speak
\nthere. I had the opportunity to travel to different countries and experience different
\ncultures.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

What\u2019s the
\nbiggest challenge you have faced in your career?<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Before I was in the IT
\nbusiness, I was a secretary. I had no formal IT education and was coding as a
\nhobby. I used automation in Microsoft Excel a lot and very basic stuff like
\nthat, and it made me decide I wanted to be a developer.<\/p>\n

But trying to get the
\nright education and my first job without having any experience was very, very hard.
\nIt was the biggest challenge, and overcoming it involved a bit of luck too. I heard
\nabout a job from a former university professor of mine. It was SAP-related, but
\nnot in development. I was first a project assistant and then kind of worked my
\nway up to developer. I knew I had to do other stuff to end up where I wanted. I
\nhad also studied communications engineering, so I had all those skills in my CV
\nalready. But work experience is so important in this field, and getting the
\nfirst job was super hard. <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Is that
\nsomething you would recommend to newcomers who are struggling to get into the
\nfield, starting with something related and moving up?<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Yeah, I think so. You can
\ndo this in a big company in particular, but also in small companies. There one
\nwears many hats, and it’s also easier to look over the shoulder of other people,
\nbecause it’s smaller. I think that, if you can’t directly get a developer job,
\ntry to sneak in through somewhere and work your way up. <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Hos was your particular
\nexperience in larger companies?<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Well, for me, my
\ndeveloper career really took off in terms of knowledge when I joined SAP. Before,
\nI worked in teams that were rather small. There were one or two developers who
\nmost of the time did a plethora of things. So, I was writing code, but I did
\nnot feel that I was able to get better at it. I wrote the same things, again
\nand again. <\/p>\n

But, when you join SAP, there are eight people working on the same problem all together. And a lot of people are smarter than you, obviously. It was the first time I ever heard about unit tests and other things I now take for granted. You don’t do this on your own if you’ve never been exposed to it. So that was tremendously helpful. And, also, in a big company, if something else interests you, it’s easier to move to another department instead of looking for a whole new job entirely. It was really a great experience. I mean, big companies sometimes move slowly and can be frustrating when it comes to some processes, but you learn a lot. <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Check out more of our interviews from our podcast episodes.<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Follow Denise Nepraunig on Twitter<\/a>, LinkedIn<\/a> and through her website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Also discover ou special guide: The Ultimate S\/4HANA Careers Guide<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We interview Denise Nepraunig, a Berlin-based iOS developer who decided to pursue her passion for Apple after 13 years in the SAP ecosystem. She\u2019s now a Swift and iOS dev at CARIAD, the Volkswagen Group\u2019s automotive software development division. This is what she did, why she did it, and how you can do it too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2130,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[754,9,773],"tags":[525,537,534,441,535,521,82,536],"class_list":["post-2107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-about-us","category-featured","category-podcast-interviews","tag-behind-the-screens","tag-berlin","tag-denise-nepraunig","tag-interview","tag-ios","tag-mindquest","tag-sap","tag-swift-developer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2107"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8030,"href":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2107\/revisions\/8030"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-uk.mindquest.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}