I graduated college in 2018. My first job was at a large, well-known, logistics company, starting in 2019. I became proficient in Angular, C#/.NET Core, got used to CI/CD, etc...we had hundreds of thousands of users. It was stressful, but felt important. Had a big team. Fast forward to April 2022. I quit that job because of poor work-life balance. I started a new one that has, culture-wise, been mostly great. People are super nice, catered lunches happen all the time, practically zero stress, great flexibility to work in-office or remote. Problem is, the company is so disorganized. The company barely uses Slack and meetings rarely happen. I don't feel like I have actual deadlines. Typical performance reviews don't really happen. I'm one of two software developers. The SaaS platform I work on isn't our biggest revenue source at the moment. Non-tech employees don't seem to care much about the vision or future of the tech side of the company (aside from C-suite people). The company is run by a married couple who vastly employs people they know/friends. Nobody is really an outsider. I am there because of a mutual connection. Our platform is not nearly as widely used as my previous job, but I have the freedom and decision-making power to implement pretty much whatever we decide. Right now, I work with Elixir and React Native w/ a Postgres DB + deploying w/ CI/CD pipelines. My ultimate question is, can I stay at a job like this for a while (a job that doesn't practice Agile standards, a job where I am not surrounded by a team of more experienced engineers to learn from) and still be marketable in the field? Is it impressive for other companies that I have been able to essentially manage IT and feature development to drive revenue for a company that does about ~20M a year? I stick to the conventions best I can - write tests, clean code, plan features out, model DB when necessary. I enjoy the stress-free aspect of it. I enjoy having the power to build greenfield projects. I just don't want to shoot myself in the foot. Thanks all. TC $135k. #software #swe #engineering
It’s fine but not *good* for your career. Suggest staying a maximum of 3-5 years. Make sure you stay on top of latest trends and know how to leetcode when it’s time to move on. Some lackluster professional experience with a side project in TheLatestHotThing and with good leetcoding, is all you need for a top tier job.
Thanks. I’d like to shoot for a bigger actual tech company after this. Right now I read a couple newsletters every day, some articles here & there. How do you stay on top of trends? Do you have any strategies for creating side projects? I have a friend who makes the same project in different technologies to get experience with them.