I recently made the personal choice to change positions. At MURAL, I joined as Director of Engineering for the Platform Pillar. I've been Director of Engineering at MURAL for just over 9 months and I love the job, and it's super rewarding. My team and I built a whole pillar and everyone is delivering. There is much work to do, but we got some serious shit done. I can't really express it any other way. We got shit done.
To be honest, I'll have to be terse, but if you read this and you have questions feel free to reach out on Twitter.
The reason to join startups vs big co is because you can have a bigger impact. There are bigger companies out there, and I selfishly desire to be a very large part of the success of a something, even if it's small. I also desire to be one of the team, where the task may ambitious and the goals ambiguous, but we all are working our hardest to figure it out. As if others don't do that at Big Co's! I am sure they do.
A Director position is a sought after position, so you might think I'm nuts for switching roles. Ultimately I see things that need to fixing, and I want to have an even more direct impact.
I've been given the opportunity to work on the biggest problems at MURAL as an Engineer. This is really my dream job. To see problems, know the solution and have the freedom to fix them. At other companies, blockers may stand in your way of fixing big problems. It can kill a company if you can't execute quickly with high quality. I've been super lucky to have great mentors over the years. I've gained one often overlooked skill:
It's one thing to know how to solve a problem, it's a completely different and (in my opinion) harder to execute big problems in a way that both brings people together and drives things forward. It's even harder to do all this with urgency. You can always bring people together by moving half the speed of smell, but who has time to move that slow?
My new title is officially title is Principal Engineer, but really I see it as a way to use my skills as a solid dev to get shit done right away.
Anyways. Back to work.
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