It has been (almost) 6 months with my new role at a startup, I feel like that I’m running everyday and have no time to really think about the change. Is this kind of the “new stupid”? I hope it’s not, so I want to summarize and write it down the difference I learned.

I managed to concentrate on my work and “run as fast as I can”

Well, I’m not saying that I didn’t concentrate on my work in my previous jobs. What I mean is I literally spend all my time on my work, not on meetings, emails, reports etc,. I used to spend a lot of time updating my manager on what I was doing and I needed to produce nice reports to my managers and sometimes, my manager’s managers.

The bottleneck is not the infrastructure team or change management team, it’s just me. I have access to all products, I can deploy or destroy the production environment anytime, as long as I’m aware of what I’m doing. That’s cool!

Delivery the product, not beautiful code

I used to work in a relatively bigger team with ~20 developers, splitted to 3 prods focused on different products. Most of the banks I worked for have “change-freeze” periods, mostly December will be one of them. One day, my manager declared that we’ll do “platform enhancements” with a few nice diagrams. However, at the moment we all know that our product got few bugs like users cannot buy our products just because they don’t have a valid date of birth in the CRM.

I’m not very happy with it because the proviritoy is wrong to me, if I receive 10% of each transaction, I’ll fix all the known production issues ASAP. but I’m not receiving any commision, neither does my manager. So we had a nice holiday season on refactoring. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think stakeholders will be happy if they really understand what we’re doing.

Small startups are completely different, with limited resources, we need to deliver a working product and get actual feedback from the markets. They might like the product because of a nice design, but definitely not because of my beautify code.

Size Does Matter

I don’t really understand this when I first read it few years back, but now I do:

We’re small and we like it that way. It gives us the ability to turn on a dime, deliver projects quickly, and dedicate extraordinary attention to your assignment. Our size allows us to work on projects we want to do rather than projects we have to do. Plus we can all fit in one cab if we squeeze. [https://37signals.com/05.html]

Do everything and get the job done

In my previous job, I and one of my teammates acted as the “DevOps” team for one year, there’s a big gap from code and functionally product, and nobody wants to get hands dirty to fix the gap. we decided to do everything required to deliver the code to a product, without writing much code for the product. we handle many tasks from managing stakeholder’s expectations, involved in system design (we gave up soon because of manager-driven design), code review, quality control, deployment, production support.

the mindset is different here, we don’t have dedicated team to help you on database, messaging queue, network etc.  so in 6 months, I picked python and Django, got my hands dirty with Google cloud, delivered few features, and of course, fixed bugs created by myself.