Last year, I moved to a new company.
But a few months before that, I had already started thinking about finding another job instead of staying where I was.
The decision happened quite quickly. I prepared my CV and started applying to job posts on LinkedIn.
After a little more than one month and a few interviews, I found a new company.
Behind this quick decision was actually a trade-off:
being willing to step out of my comfort zone.
The Old Company Was Completely Fine
At my previous company, everything wasn’t just fine — it was very good.
My manager and colleagues appreciated me, and I also felt that I was bringing real value to the company.
I had worked there for more than three years. I knew the projects very well, almost every line of code felt familiar, and the technologies we used were modern.
The salary was good, and there were yearly bonuses.
Overall, there was nothing to complain about regarding the working environment or the company culture.
One Small Problem…
The only issue for me was this:
The company was a subsidiary of a large corporation, and all compliance rules were decided at the group level.
I understand that when an organization becomes very large, clear processes are necessary to keep things running smoothly.
So the organization was divided into many specialized teams, each responsible for a specific area.
My role was simply developer.
That meant my job was to build features and push the code to git.
After that, I just waited for the pipeline to deploy to staging or production.
If something went wrong, I had to send a message to another team so they could debug it.
Even a small feature required creating a ticket and getting approval from another team before deploying to production.
What Started to Frustrate Me
Because of this process, many things felt slow.
Whenever there was a problem, I had to ask another team to help. I couldn’t touch anything except the code.
It made me feel a bit restricted.
Sometimes a very small change could take a whole week before reaching production.
Another issue was learning.
Outside of coding, I also wanted to understand:
- infrastructure
- databases
- cloud systems
- monitoring
But if I was always asking someone else to debug things, and never doing it myself, I felt that I would never really understand those areas deeply.
What Did I Actually Have at That Time?
To be honest, not that much.
I had experience as a full-stack developer:
- Java with Spring Boot
- JavaScript with React
And I had the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification.
I studied and prepared for that exam on my own and managed to pass it.
Honestly, I should also thank that certification — because it helped me realize how little I actually knew 😄
What Did the New Company Offer?
Interestingly, the technology stack was almost exactly the same as my old company.
The main difference was that they were building their system with microservices, something I had never worked with before.
The new company also needed someone with AWS experience to help modernize their infrastructure.
That sounded exactly like what I was looking for.
Since it was a startup, I knew I would have the opportunity to touch many parts of the system and learn much more.
Stepping Out of My Comfort Zone
In the end, I decided to leave my old company.
I wanted to step out of my comfort zone and challenge myself.
I wanted to improve, learn more things, and understand systems beyond just writing code.
At my new company, I always try to work with a learning mindset.
Technology moves very fast, and I hope I don’t fall too far behind.
Conclusion
So far, everything has been going well.
Hopefully it will continue that way in the future 😉
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