Cloud service specialist found a home in Finland

Ilavarasi has spent more than six years at CSC, even if her original plan was not to stay with the company, or even in Finland, for such a long time. It all started when Ilavarasi returned to finish her Master’s studies at Aalto University in 2017. The winter before, she had gone to Luxembourg to work on her master’s thesis and escape the cold Finnish winter.

While in Finland, she happened to see CSC’s advertisement looking for trainees for tasks that seemed direct and relevant to her studies : ”It was like, hey, a trainee job. Do you know this language or any of this? It wasn’t too intimidating.” She decided to apply, and as a trainee she got an opportunity to work with backend, and at times also frontend, coding in the Notebooks service. As the demand for the service increased and more scalability was needed, her team begun to develop Kubernetes based platform for CSC Notebooks service. This platform caught Ilavarasi’s interest immediately, and she changed to CSC’s cloud group where she still continues to work.

Shared values and management support

What has been so good about working at CSC that Ilavarasi has stayed for several years after the traineeship? The first thing Ilavarasi brings up is values, ”I like the values that we have. We do good to the society.” In CSC’s values, ‘We advance expertise as a community with assurance and integrity’, caring and responsibility do stand out. Common activities have also helped Ilavarasi to find good, lifelong friends at CSC: ”I met some good friends here in my first year. And we’re still friends and family friends, and do, for example, barbeques together.”

What Ilavarasi finds particularly meaningful is that she can work with the same services that she used in her studies and which are offered to scientists: ”I remember we were all so driven to finish the assignments and these tools are the ones that we were using. And now I’m part of designing those tools so it feels somehow that I’m providing the platform for those people to actually get where they want.” Ilavarasi says that her personal experience in using the services also gives her a good grip on user needs and preferences.

I like the values that we have. We do good to the society.

Ilavarasi Radhakrishnan, CSC

The fact that she has developed both as an employee and as a person at CSC is also important for Ilavarasi. This has been promoted by the support of her supervisor, of which she gives a concrete example from the early stages of her career. The service she was maintaining was down, and she did not dare ask her colleagues for help. At that moment, the supervisor’s questions helped to pin down the problem and their assistance with contacting the right colleagues seemed very important and were a great relief. ”If you ask right questions and you keep on going, there are people who can support you. Now I don’t mind knocking anybody’s door”, Ilavarasi sums up both the communal spirit at CSC and her personal professional development.

Working at CSC with an international background

Ilavarasi completed her Master’s degree at Aalto University, but her background is international. Before working at CSC, Ilavarasi completed a Bachelor’s degree in India, her home country, where she also worked on solving switching and routing issues in networking in an international company for a few years before starting her Master’s studies.

According to Ilavarasi, an international background has both advantages and disadvantages. CSC is a bilingual organization, but the job descriptions of some tasks require not only English but also Finnish proficiency. This means that not all doors are open to her inside the company, but Ilavarasi sees this as a factor that motivates her to learn Finnish. She has noticed that an international background can also be a strength: ”I find that people with different backgrounds differ in what they can see or what they’re not seeing.” This is highlighted in different problem-solving situations, where the issue must be examined from many different perspectives.

Flexible work and a new chapter in family life

While Ilavarasi enjoys working at CSC, an interesting job and friendly colleagues alone did not persuade her to stay in Finland. In addition to a job, she also found her spouse in Finland. The family has been extra busy recently, as the couple’s first child was born in late summer 2023. Ilavarasi says that working while pregnant was no problem because she finds that CSC can accommodate different life situations and that the work can be organized flexibly: ”People are flexible and if I want to work remotely or take holidays, I think here we have that flexibility. I feel like I can do what is best for me.”

In her leisure time, her hobbies include equity investments and stock analyses, and she describes herself as an honest and hard-working person who also knows how to have fun.