Hm, it’s been a busy couple o’ months. Post-home-purchase, I’ve been occupied with work, as we ramp up additional engineers, projects, and ambitions for this new year.
The experience of working for a real startup – to be more precise, a startup still in its infancy – has been enlightening, though not without stress and mental fatigue. My previous stints at Factset and Tagged were substantially different; these companies were well-established and enjoyed maturity in engineers and processes, something that I find myself in the midst of shaping at LOLapps.
Though it makes things interesting, sometimes I yearn for the reassurance of established technique and culture in dicey situations. I suppose every software firm goes through the same growing pains: what worked for two engineers does not scale to 8, infrastructure for one product becomes brittle when supporting 5; informal friendships aren’t enough when dealing with a company of 15. The continual realization of inefficacy from growth puts on a damper on the excitement it generates.
Our products themselves, social Facebook applications, change intermittently with their whims and our internal product metrics. Coding is fast-and-furious, releases are near-instantaneous (traditional software follows a much more rigorous schedule, look at Windows Vista), and timescales for progress are measured in days, sometimes hours. There hasn’t been much time for reflection or learning, and sometimes the quality does suffer, if ever so slightly, under the relentless demands of the marketplace.
Not that everything is dark and gloomy, of course; the aforementioned healthy revenues and steady growth have a tendency to brighten our days, and continued success has the ability to excite and induce euphoria. I have to admit that we’ve done pretty good for ourselves, and the stream of resume letters forwarded to my inbox daily reminds me of how lucky I am – given the current competitive atmosphere and shoddy economy – to hold this job .
But I suppose the later evenings and obsession with all things work-related comes with the territory, that of being now one of the senior engineers of a company. I’m not terribly enthusiastic about work steadily creeping into the rest of my life, but if given the choice, yea, I would probably do it over again.
If nothing else, just to say that I lived the life of a startup, in the middle of the good and bad of a dynamic software sub-industry, and ta-da, I survived.