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I recommend getting into a small company (i.e. 80-200 employees and profitable), if possible. At this size, you have opportunities to wear different hats and mo
by lhorie 11y ago
I recommend getting into a small company (i.e. 80-200 employees and profitable), if possible. At this size, you have opportunities to wear different hats and moving sideways, but you also get opportunities to see and participate in workforce scaling (helping form new processes, seeing new departments emerge, etc).
The important thing is to be vocal about what you want to do. If you came in as a frontend dev want to do more about backend work, go find gossip about new projects and express your areas of interest to higher ups. If you want manage people, offer to improve the technical hiring test. If something is stupid (maybe there's burnout due to too much overtime, or a process is over-bureaucratic, or some aspect of development is too cowboy), be proactive and offer solutions.
The unique thing about small companies is that there are enough people that narrowmindedness and complacency start to appear (and with it, process problems), which gives you plenty of opportunities to prove yourself with out-of-the-box thinking, but not enough bureaucracy to prevent you from being able to make changes.
- sutterbomb 11y agoThis was my experience and it has worked out really well for me. I've seen a few levels of scale (~120 people to start, ~1500 now), have worked in several different departments and touched nearly every area of the business. Incredible learning opportunities and ability to drive real change/results (which is a main argument for startups) while also having advantages of larger companies in terms of resources, training, pay etc.
- s3nnyy 11y agoI totally agree. This is the path I have taken and I do not look back. I rebuilt the recruiting process at my first IT-company after college. Now I started my own IT-recruiting agency in Zurich. If you look for a tech-job in the most liveable city in the world, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on http://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to-switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90 http://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to... or send me a mail to the mail-address in my HN-profile.