Overview
Sterkens published a post on the madewithlove blog in December 2018 describing what it is like to be the only non-technical person in a technology company, and noted that he had joined about a year earlier. In February 2020 he wrote about the first People Leadership dinner the company organised, an event for HR professionals, recruiters and operations managers working at technology startups.
Tim Sterkens is COO and Partner at madewithlove, a software consultancy founded in 2008 and headquartered in Belgium. He works alongside Andreas Creten, the CEO and founding partner, and Dimitri Roose, a partner and CTO in residence. The company describes a team of more than 20 engineers and CTOs spread across more than 10 countries, and Sterkens covers the operational side of the business. He came to the company from a career in HR and has written about bringing HR knowledge and internal process review into an organisation of developers.
Career history
In the news
- A thought I had in the shower this morning 🚿: I hardly hear anyone speak about their 60-, 80-, or even 100-hour workweek anymore 🤔. Are we actually working less, or did we finally agree that these numbers have always been ridiculously unrealistic for most people? 😆 #companyculture #worklifebalance
- We wrote and published an updated job description last week. Two days later, a stack of CVs landed that matched it almost word for word. Turns out AI doesn't just help people write applications anymore. It writes them to spec, creates proper LinkedIn profiles, mirroring every requirement straight back at you 😅. We sometimes call phone numbers to verify that candidates are real. Spoiler: some weren't. The irony isn't lost on us. The madewithlove team leans on AI daily to move faster, and it's the same tech quietly clogging up our
- Hello #software #engineers 👋! madewithlove is looking for communicative, experienced and fun-to-work-with #developers (f/m/x), who have fully embraced #agentic development 🚀 Check the (time zone!) requirements below and apply. Fake profiles or persons, please refrain 🙏 . Feel free to share if you are still happy at your work, but you know someone who isn't ❤️ https://lnkd.in/etcbBdWT
- Everyone wants to be an "AI-native" company. Almost nobody agrees on what that means by Monday morning 🤖 Our #CTO-in-residence, Peter Eysermans, just published his take, and it wasn't the three-year roadmap I expected. His version: a usage policy. A map of your data. One bounded experiment. And both the enthusiasts and the sceptics are in the same room. Build the ability to change, not a grand overhaul. I run ops, not code, and this is the first #AI piece in a while I could actually act on this week. The full post is up on our
- Recently, I got this response from an applicant whom I turned down during the CV screening: "Honestly, this is the first response I’ve received after months of applying, so even though it wasn’t the outcome I was hoping for, I’m still glad to have heard back." A call to my #HR colleagues: please make the short (or whatever #AI) effort to communicate with the people who put in the work of applying to your vacancies. It does make a difference #respect #gratitude 🙏
- As an #HR professional, reading #RadicalCandor by Kim Scott was probably long overdue (but better late than never, right) 😇. Many learnings and 💡 moments, but the importance of personal relationships and care stood out for me. What was your biggest takeaway from this book? 👇
- Someone typed "Signing off. See you in two weeks 👋" in our general Slack channel yesterday. Four people replied "Enjoy!" within a minute. Nobody asked for handover notes. That's basically our entire PTO process. No approval chain, no "please confirm coverage" thread, no manager sign-off. Just a wave, a few cheers, and everyone moves on with their day. We refer to it as #FreeRangeManagement: trust people to run their own time, including the weeks they're not around at all. It's not chaos. The work still gets done. Nobody needs a
- I made it back from an amazing and refreshing three-week holiday on another continent and in a different culture 🇪🇨. Besides the beautiful, impressive nature, another thing stood out to me: not a single word or sign about #AI for three weeks 🤯. While our industry can't stop talking about it, there are still places where they seem to survive without LLMs and prompting #bubble
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