Employee in the Berlin Digital Lab
A special feature of the Berlin Labs are the fixed working hours.
(Photo: Volkswagen)
BerlinFirst of all, nobody would come up with the idea that the branch of an automobile manufacturer is housed in the building. Muesli cups stand on the shelf on the wall, in the corner one of the employees has made himself comfortable on a fatboy. Table tennis is eagerly played behind a glass door, and there is even a music room with electric guitar and drums.
Who at Volkswagen in Wolfsburg is on the band, can only dream of such working conditions. The generously converted warehouse in the old port of Friedrichshain on Berlin’s Spree bank represents the new world of an automobile manufacturer. In the Digital Lab of the VWGroup are Housed software developers and product designerswho want to do their share to turn a classic car manufacturer into an IT company.
The entire automotive industry is facing a major transformation: digitization, autonomous driving, the Change to the mobility provider – all over the need for additional IT and software knowledge is growing, That’s why Volkswagen is setting up new, specialized bases all over the world, the so-called Labs. The Berlin-based software company was founded three years ago, and there are now seven of these digital laboratories worldwide.
The labs are small software units with 60 to 80 employees, which are more like a start-up and have little to do with a large industrial group. In these software labs many of the computer programs are written, with which the VW group in some years with established IT corporations such as Microsoft or Apple wants to act at eye level.
CEO Herbert Diess has proclaimed the motto of the “smartphone on four wheels”. As a result, programs for navigation systems or car sharing are being written in the new Digital Labs.
The new software labs should grow to a maximum of 100 employees. From a VW perspective, this limit is a guarantee that the labs will remain agile in the next few years and can react quickly to current changes in the IT world. Digitization is demanding that the auto industry abandon its decades-old processes.
The labs are now getting more orders from the group than they can handle in the end. Gunnar Kilian, VW personnel director
The automotive industry is very much shaped by the product life cycle of a vehicle, which averages around seven years. In the IT world, weeks, sometimes even days, decide. Thus, the VW software developers work on the Berlin Spree shore under very different conditions than their colleagues in the Wolfsburg car factory.
Although digital laboratories may have been viewed with skepticism within the group in the beginning, they have become more and more established as an integral part of the entire company. Seven out of a total of twelve Group brands are permanent buyers of the computer programs written in the Berlin Lab.
The focus is on the car brands, the truck subsidiaries are not yet there. “The labs are now getting more orders from the group than they can handle in the end,” says VW HR Director Gunnar Kilian.
The work of the software developers has become noticeable throughout the Group. The most important project in her work is new platform services that have been set up by the individual car brands such as Volkswagen. Six sales regions around the globe with 1.5 million users are currently connected.
Also at the new VW car sharing service “We share” are the people of Berlin: They have written the log-in programming for this service.
Berlin is attractive
That the VW Group with one of its seven new Digital Labs after Berlin has pulled, has a good reason. Worldwide, a race has begun under the group for the best IT heads. Volkswagen, for example, is currently looking for around 2,000 employees for its own IT area.
Berlin has a high attraction as a location for such a software laboratory. Employees from abroad can easily be won for the German capital. “We manage that better and better,” says Chief Officer Kilian. The car is still a very interesting product.
60 employees from 27 nations work in the Berlin Lab. English is the working language The average age is 35 years, one third of the employees are women. “It really appealed to me to come to Berlin,” says Melissa Zee from Singapore. As a designer, she could make her contribution to fundamentally changing mobility.
Oliver Schnell did not have quite the time to come to Volkswagen to the lab. He comes from Westphalia and now works in Berlin as a software developer. He did not regret going to an automobile manufacturer. “The way of working here is very special, like in Silicon Valley,” he says. He is motivated by the combination of writing computer programs for vehicles. Because: “Google does not build cars.”
The way of working in the digital lab is noticeably different. At Volkswagen in Berlin we work in the so-called pairing. Pair programming is a central principle in the digital lab: the first in the team writes the codes, the second one watches, controls, makes suggestions, detects mistakes. “At first glance, it might seem superfluous for two people to do the same job. But that’s not it, “says Jochen Scherl, one of the two heads of the lab.
“In tandem, our programmers find better solutions, make better decisions, and make fewer mistakes. So you achieve a much higher quality, “he adds. Another advantage: the knowledge is distributed. “If, for example, a programmer gets sick, at least one other person is still familiar with the project – the work can continue without any problem,” Scherl continues.
Teamwork is clearly at the forefront at VW in Berlin. A second Steve Jobs as at Apple it should not be there so fast.
Each working day ends at 5pm
Another special feature of the Berlin Lab is the working hours. The start is set in the morning at 8.30 clock. The workday usually starts with a breakfast, which then equals a casual team meeting. Then it goes to the computers to actually work with the development of new software.
“We pay close attention to the work-life balance,” says Peter Garzarella, the second director of Volkswagen’s Berlin Lab. Therefore, the working day ends there on time for every employee at 5 pm.
Programming, coding is an exhausting job. Maintaining rest periods is therefore important. The employees from the lab need long enough periods for regeneration. The employees would have repaid this with great loyalty – in the past three years, only two employees had left the company.
Volkswagen digital lab in Berlin
In offices, many of the computer programs are written, with which the VW Group wants to act in a few years with established IT companies such as Microsoft or Apple at eye level.
(Photo: Volkswagen)
On the other hand, there are no special rights for the employees of the VW Lab in Berlin when paying. Like any other Volkswagen employee, they are paid according to the company collective agreement. For IT start-ups rather untypical, but for the Wolfsburg car company completely normal: Also for the Berlin software lab, there is a works council, home union as in the entire company is the IG metal,
Quite so with the solid end of work always at 17 o’clock it is true then but not. On weekends there is a turn on call service: the programmers must be able to intervene if there are problems anywhere in the world with the software they have developed.
This does not seem to be a particular problem for the employees. Because: “There has never been anybody calling,” emphasizes Oliver Schnell. For him, the reason is obvious: “This is due to the high quality of our software.”