You never know how your life will turn out, and that’s the best part about it. Even if you think everything is going according to the plan, you can suddenly rethink your decisions and, for example, change your career path. 

That’s what happened to Dalia Tamulytė. She was studying a different field to IT, but when the time came, she decided to challenge herself and start her developer career. Let’s take a closer look at her story and what is the daily life of solution developers at SEB, one of the biggest IT employers in the Nordics. 

Dalia, tell us a bit about yourself. What is your current role, and what are you responsible for?

I’m a Junior Solution Developer in the Factoring IT support group. My responsibilities include maintaining the system, working with data queries, and building various small applications.

What was your career path? How did you end up in your position? 

Actually, this is my first full-time job after my studies. Even though I initially intended to go into science, I later changed my mind and joined SEB with the SEB Tech program. My time in SEB helped me gain tech skills and start a career path in IT.

“ IT attracted me because the area is so versatile and changing. There are many different ways to express your skills and creativity by solving sprint tasks, negotiating with colleagues, and even making presentations.”

You mentioned that you studied a different field. Why did you choose to switch your career to IT?

Before joining SEB, I studied Mathematics and Physics. During my time at university, I always felt the lack of IT classes and even chose one optional subject where I got to study programming with Wolfram Mathematica and C++. I really enjoyed it! After my studies, I shortly worked as a Mathematics and Physics tutor, and since I felt that I was only doing this temporarily, I started thinking about what I could do in the future. Continuing my studies was one of the options, but I also remembered that I enjoyed coding, so I slowly shifted my focus to that area.

IT attracted me because the area is so versatile and changing. There are many different ways to express your skills and creativity by solving sprint tasks, negotiating with colleagues, and even making presentations. Let’s not forget that IT skills are very useful these days.

“ Probably the most exciting part of my job is building and maintaining .NET applications – my senior colleague and I are working on that.”

Can you tell us about your daily routine as a Junior Solution Developer?  

In the morning, I check my email and review my assigned tasks. Then I grab a snack and a cup of tea and head into the scrum meeting, where we discuss our progress and our tasks for the day. The rest of the day is devoted to working on development tasks, meetings, and solving production problems.

Our team is quite small – it consists of seven solution developers. We all work on maintaining the Aquarius system we bought from an external vendor. We also spend quite a lot of time writing SQL queries and improving the performance of our database. Probably the most exciting part of my job is building and maintaining .NET applications – my senior colleague and I are working on that. The applications are usually not very big, but we get to build them from scratch and try out new things, like Kafka, SebShift, and so on.

What skills do you need to be successful in your field?

You must be curious and like to solve various unexpected problems. It’s essential to stay optimistic even if you see that your development is stuck. If you don’t give up, you’ll definitely find a solution to any problem!

“ There are still so many things I don’t know, and sometimes the lack of knowledge is a bit frustrating.”

What are the biggest challenges in your work? 

There are still so many things I don’t know, and sometimes the lack of knowledge is a bit frustrating. But I know that learning is a never-ending journey, so it’s great to constantly gain understanding and not be stuck working on non-changing problems.

And what is the most enjoyable part of your job?

Seeing the results of your work is the best part for me. Whether it’s a new application or a freshly-developed chunk of code – seeing it in action is very exciting!

“ Be brave and trust yourself because you are your biggest fan and supporter.“

Do you have any advice for women thinking of starting their career path in IT?

Be brave and trust yourself because you are your biggest fan and supporter. If you believe in yourself, people will believe in you too!