During his years with V3, Christopher Aldo has accumulated plenty of experience in seeing each solution from concept to implementation and aftersales support. In this interview, he shares with us his role as Project Manager, what makes him stay at V3, as well as a surprising talent for music.

1. What’s your background before coming to work at V3?
Although I graduated from NUS’s electrical engineering, my interest has always revolved around programming. I signed up as a Software Engineer for my first job before V3, but somehow ended up doing plenty of Service Engineer tasks on site, such as performing parts replacements and quality checks for machines. It was a good experience, but I decided I wanted to work more with software.

2. What motivates you to wake up and go to work for the past 9 years?
To me, in order to stay at the same company for a long time, the work has to be rewarding. At V3, I started with software design and programming.

Subsequently, I had the chance to interact with customers directly for requirements gathering all the way up to system testing, where I get to see them utilise what my team and I have spent hundreds of hours developing. It’s good to know that the product of our labour helps users with their work.

3. What’s it like working as the Project Manager heading software development at V3?
The ‘Project Manager’ aspect is only one part of my role. I need to know how the system should be designed, work as a developer on some portion of the project, and support customers after the project goes live. Personally speaking, half the fun is in playing these multiple roles.

4. Why did you choose to work at V3?
It started rather coincidentally when my friend roped me in. I joined V3 in 2012, so it’s my 9th year with the company. I’m still with V3 because over the years, I’m exposed to plenty of opportunities where I can learn different things both in the technical field and at a management level.

Most of the time, “learning” in V3 has to be self-initiated, but there will be ample time given. On top of that, I enjoy the absence of micromanagement, flexible working hours (sometimes I work out before I work) and healthy office culture that’s free of politics.

5. What was a project you did which you feel most accomplished working on?
There are a few noteworthy projects one of which is the project we did for NTUC Health back in 2015-2016. Initially the project was supposed to be handled by 5 other software engineers, with me as the Project Manager.

However, over the course of a few months, 3 of the software engineers left. Following that I grew a lot in terms of technical development because I ended up doing web development, mobile development, system integration, including UAT and training.

At that time, I was thankful that the customer had assigned a project team to work directly with me. During the peak period, we spent 20-30 hours weekly on brainstorming, developing, and testing the solution. I learnt that maintaining genuine customer relationships play a huge role in project success.

6. What are you most looking forward to in the future at V3?
The day when our products reach a subscription count in the millions, and the only thing to worry about is getting new servers to handle the load.

7. What’s something about you that might surprise people?
I know how to play all instruments in a standard band setting…just don’t ask me to sing 🙂

8. What’s the first thing you’ll do once the world is free of the pandemic?
Definitely visit my home back in Indonesia, as I haven’t seen my parents for a very long time ever since air travel was shut down due to Covid-19.