I was working at U+ as a back-end developer for almost a year. I had a great team, interesting projects, and had learned a ton of new stuff. At the end of one project, when we started to get frustrated with the client, I decided to take an offer to join a big company. I thought about this as a challenge and a chance to learn from top developers. In short, after six months I came back to U+.
I didn’t arrive at this decision overnight, it was a long process of identifying what I miss doing and what I enjoy most in work.
Joy
Most importantly, you have to be happy with what you’re doing. For me it’s about working on meaningful products I can believe in. This includes implementing them with modern technologies that can solve or speed up the problems users are facing and streamline your own development processes.
After I moved to the larger company, I realized that there were too many days in a row when I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing; that I was forcing myself to do work that was draining my energy and motivation. I was just a maintainer fixing bugs in really old products with a lot of technical debt.
I was missing what I did at U+: building interesting products from the ground up, having the possibility to shape them, and choose which tech stack and tools to use.
Freedom
What I missed most of all was the freedom. Being stuck on site and commuting every day as a developer in an age of digital nomads doesn’t make sense. Yes, you can have home office from time to time, but you need all kinds of roles and certificates to be approved in order to connect to the internal system via VPN.
As a developer, being given the freedom and trust to have regular home office or work remotely is one of the best perks you can get from your employer. You simply have to take responsibility for finishing your task so you don’t impede any of your colleagues.
Making sense
Developers in big companies face intricate processes and bureaucracy much of the time. First, it will take some time to learn the ropes; then it will take a lot of time and effort to keep performing within these boundaries.
This is time you could invest in learning new technologies or skills. For example, after fixing a bug, you have to fill out a lot of documents before it goes live. Nobody likes doing this stuff.
Rules are necessary, but in a reasonable amount.
Future
Most big companies use internal tools and frameworks, and you are digging into a very specific narrow technological niche. IT is a fast industry. When you leave a big company after, say, five years, your skill set and technological perspective will be unfortunately narrow and outdated. One thing I especially appreciate about U+ is its eagerness to adopt the newest processes and strategies, so development can be as swift and comprehensive as possible.
Final thoughts
Don’t get me wrong, I did learn bunch of new stuff and met some great people in my corporate job, but I realized I need something different. There is a big lack of developers right now on the job market, so I could join many other companies. Nonetheless, at U+ I know that from a human perspective I can work with great people with similar motivation, in a congenial environment, all while using the hottest technologies and learning something new. What more do you want?
