I am a software engineer. I moved from a big company to a startup since October last year, Ask Me Anything!

#ama

Oldest comments (9)

Alexandre Formoso • Apr 6 '19 • Edited

What’s been the difference for you so far working for a start up company versus a big company?

Coding Sam • Apr 7 '19

The biggest difference is that, here I get more responsibility, than I use to get. Because resources are limited, specially, human resources. Each one, even developers, get more important tasks to do. For instance, I already gave two talks to my co workers and I am now in charge of running the retrospectives. I am just 6 month old employee ;)

Ben Weiser • Apr 6 '19

Do you strongly believe in the product that you're building at the startup? I've only worked for large F500 companies so the thought of going to a start up is a bit daunting for me given how many go belly under. Are you concerned about whether the company will still be around in 5 years?

Coding Sam • Apr 7 '19

I really believe! This startup have things pretty much figured out. We are not just a bunch of geeks coding in a garage. There is a pretty solid structure. But we are still getting funding and we are not profitable yet. Things are going pretty well.
When I got the offer I was a bit sceptic. I was afraid that I am going to work crazy long hours, not getting vacations or even worse not getting my paycheck sometimes. I am there since October and guess what... I get the paycheck every single month, I already scheduled my vacations and most days I leave around 6pm. On most fridays we leave work before that and we get some beers together.

I regret nothing and you know what... You really don't have much to lose because, if this thing does not work out, it just means I have to find another job. Nowadays everybody is looking for developers so that would not be a problem ;)

Coding Sam • Apr 7 '19

Most times is like this...
I arrive at the office, I joined the standup meeting (which has to be through slack because the team is distributed in two countries). After standup I drink my coffee and I start on working on whatever I told in standup that I would be working on. Then, it depends. Most times I end up coding some React components and do a bit of NodeJS backend work. But sometimes I have to dig into PHP (nothing is perfect, I guess). There are some days that I have to attend some meetings (groomings, meetings with UX team, etc)... So yeah, everyday is kinda different ;)

Yaser Al-Najjar • Apr 7 '19

What are the pros and cons of this decision?

Coding Sam • Apr 9 '19

The pros:

You get more responsibility
You have more impact in the development process and in the product
A really cool environment

The cons:

Sometimes you have to do operations related stuff or handle some tasks that you are not really interested in, because there are not that many human resources. But I would say that the time you spend doing really cool stuff is way greater than the time you spend on these kind of tasks ;)

Coding Sam • Apr 8 '19

I really don't feel I wearing "many hats". The talks I gave were about technical stuff and I had the initiative to give them. The retrospectives were ran by a senior developer. I could just said no to these challenges. But I loved the idea. I am still able to focus on coding and from time to time I have these tasks which I really like to do :)