Seven Questions To Our Head Of System Administration, Erwin

Seven questions
to Head of System
Administration,
Erwin

March 22, 2018

Get to know Erwin Schliske (Head of System Administration, Cologne office)

If anyone has true admin genes, it’s him: Erwin has been part of the Avenga team since July 2006 and today, as Head of System Administration, heads a team of four in Cologne and Berlin. Time for a short interview – time for seven questions to our Avenga colleague!

Erwin, which tasks are lying on the table for you and your team?

Quite a lot! Broadly speaking, all our topics are about business. Since we are involved in very different projects, the spectrum is very wide. When we support the project teams, we advise on architectures and provide the appropriate infrastructure in our data center or at a cloud provider. If customers want to use our products in their data center, we configure their stack in cooperation with the customer’s IT department and advice on optimization and best practices. Jointly with the other product teams, we develop and operate our product wao.io, where it is often a matter of finding the smallest adjustment screws to reduce the platform response times by a few milliseconds. Last but not least, we provide the other teams with systems like load balancers, caches, databases, and log servers. The challenge we face every day is to find the best technical answer to all the questions.

What do you consider as part of a working day?

I’ve become less of a table football & co person, with the exception sometimes of our ping-pong table. For me, a good working day is, above all, having a quiet environment to concentrate on my work. This is why I also love our office. It is large, quiet and has a brilliant view of the cathedral, which is almost within reach. A must, too, is the exchange with colleagues. As our team is divided between both locations, Cologne and Berlin, many “meetings” don’t take place at the coffee machine but via video conference.

What do you particularly like about Avenga?

We have a very close atmosphere and I can talk to almost all colleagues about not only professional but also private matters. What is special is the flexibility that everyone has when things don’t go according to plan in their private lives, for example. We don’t expect people to completely exclude their private matters during working hours. I also appreciate the professional competence of my colleagues and our varied working environment. At Avenga, no day is like the next. Here I not only have the opportunity but also the duty, to constantly deal with new technologies. A dream for every admin!

Describe our team in three words.

More than colleagues!

If you hadn’t become a system administrator, then…

Whew, what else would I have become? Ever since high school, this is what I wanted. I find technology simply fascinating. I once thought about working with people with special needs. But then I realized IT is more my calling. And I must say that I always like getting on the train to Cologne in the morning and on to Avenga. So the decision was right.

Which websites do you visit most often?

heise.de for the technology overview and faz.net to keep up with world events. Apart from that, I have a lot of blogs in my feed list that I follow.

Early or late riser?

Early riser. For the simple reason of getting to the bathroom before my four girls!