40th anniversary Sjaak Wijen

Look beyond your nose. If you try to help other people with a problem, you always learn something! 

'My first day at work was actually when I was an intern at StienenBE. Back then there were no small breaks, Ineke still brought coffee and tea around then.
I started as a production worker. After about 2 years I became a panel builder, and after a few years service was added. 
Somewhere in the 90s I started testing software for the development department. I still did panel building alongside it, but as of 2005 I no longer built panels full time.
A few more later I was given the title product specialist. To this was added around 2016 “support development” with various tasks such as maintenance screens PL-9500.

The biggest change in the last 40 years is the organization.
The workforce is now about 10 times larger than when I started at “Stienen Bedrijfs Elektronica”.
If there was a problem “in the old days” you just walked up to someone, consulted with each other and the problem was solved. Nowadays this is a bit different.

There have been several special moments at Stienen in those 40 years....
But what I remember most is that late last century I once had to commission a fully automatic egg controller in Malaysia the EBR-4. However, during commissioning I encountered a problem that could only be solved with a software change. This problem had to be solved in order to deliver the installation. Hans Kessels, now retired, solved it quite quickly and a new Eprom had to be made and placed in the EBR-4 computer. I had already brought everything with me just to be sure, so a laptop, Eproms, an Eprom burner and a modem to transfer files. So I sat there in the office in Malaysia, set up the laptop and modem and tried to download the file Hans had prepared. By golly, it simply did not work to set up a data connection to the Netherlands, not even at the lowest speed of 300 Baud, which is actually no longer proposed nowadays. But no problem Hans had a solution. Let's do it by hand! I got instructions from Hans over the phone using a HEX editor to make the changes to the program character by character. Then burned and inserted the Eprom and everything worked as desired, so I could deliver the installation!

The most valuable lesson of my career is : Look beyond your nose. If you try to help other people with a problem, you always learn something! 
This in turn can lead to improvement opportunities for yourself, see my career within Stienen!'