Who we are
Vision & progress
There are approximately 35000 IT companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland combined. Of these, less than 800 companies have one or more products of their own. HighPots belongs to those companies that have successfully developed and operate their own products. So we are not only a service provider, but also a manufacturer. And also we are looking for good IT staff to balance load peaks.
Thus, we not only have experience in release management and maintenance of software products, but it is also easy for us to identify with the situations of our customers. HighPots operates with about 130 IT experts on the market. Our focus is on software development, requirements engineering (technical
requirements management) and data analysis. All 3 areas are required to successfully implement machine learning for our customers. See also the Data Analytics Case Study from our cooperation project with the University of Oxford.
Rüdiger Off
Head of R&D
In terms of my university education, I am a natural scientist and engineer. But my job description is now more like that of a juggler.
I always make sure that all the balls - whether sales, software development, marketing or R&D - run in an orderly path; of course, I constantly adjust the paths to the dynamics of the market and the technological progress.
What applies to all employees of HighPots also applies to the management: we are given working time to develop our own ideas, services or prototypes, to try them out and to present them to customers.
Read more…
I also use my time to develop new research methods. As a physicist and engineer, I combine scientific methods with methods from epistemology, process philosophy and the sociology of knowledge. In my "old days" I even enrolled again at university to study sociology for this purpose.
HighPots was founded in the 1980s as a tutoring association to help students. The idea of helping is still firmly anchored in the HighPots DNA - regardless of whether it is still a matter of pupils/students, adults or organizations.
To me, there is no more beautiful sense than purposeful, peaceful and lively interactions and the realization of a common goal that everyone involved is burning for.
In this respect, every new working day is a (grounding) event for me. In the process, a great joy and curiosity develops, which I transfer to colleagues, customers and partners.
Show less
Comments from our SW experts
Some of our employees have their say
When I see this eternal pixel pushing of my SW development colleagues from the frontend area, I’m happy every time anew about my role as a backend developer. Whether REST APIs, Java, C++ or PHP – everything is better than Java/TypeScript & Co. 😉
I have only been working for HighPots since January 2022. Before that, I was at Tsinghua University in Beijing doing my PhD in theoretical computer science (on cryptography and homomorphic encryption schemes). I feel that the security of information regardless of how it is stored or transported is one of the most important future issues. Regardless of whether data is transmitted over quantum networks or classical networks. And it doesn’t matter whether the attacks come from quantum computers or botnets, our customers’ data and also HighPots data must be as secure as possible.
I have been with HighPots since 2011 and ensure the smooth operation of our internal IT. This includes networks, servers, telephone systems and also the DevOps area; together with my department, I ensure that our site-distributed SW development works – this also includes, for example, the topics of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) – whether with Kubernates, Docker or server virtualization.
I have been working as in-house counsel for HighPots for more than 20 years, taking care of software licenses and patents. I also work closely with my colleague Thomas from data protection. In doing so, I always try to take our clients’ point of view and make the contracts as customer-friendly as possible while reducing the risk for HighPots. I walk this tightrope with passion every day.
Whether descriptive, inductive or explorative statistics, whether Gaussian, Bernoulli, Laplace, Bayesian epistemology or a mixture – everything succeeds with R or Python. But designing threshold functions in neural networks is also fun. Not because I studied theoretical mathematics, but because I am curious.
Whether sprint or refinement meetings, you have to pull every word out of the developers’ noses 🙂 – if it weren’t for us Scrum Masters, many developers wouldn’t know that their vocal cords aren’t a bad twist of fate.
The agile manifesto and agile working, also in Scaled Agile environments (SAFe) is modern and in many cases also efficient. But Scrum and SAFe do not fit every project or (project) organization. Waterfall, V-model and phase project management methods also have their place. I am at home in many project method worlds and would not like to miss this versatility. But before I continue writing here, first a coffee…. 🙂
The quote from Alice in Wonderland describes my role at HighPots quite well: “Could you please tell me which way to go from here?” asks Alice “That depends mostly on where you want to go” replies the cat “I don’t know” says Alice “Then it doesn’t matter where you go” replies the cat. I make sure that all stakeholders know exactly where to go.
2 things are a real pleasure. Firstly, to prove that programmers are not infallible and secondly that unit tests are only half the truth.
