| This resonates. I spent 8 years at the same startup - it graduated from chaotic and exciting to staid and dysfunctional. I moved pretty high up so was in a position where I could introduce modern practises like agile, but I could never get management to mandate dev staff to do simple things like have a daily standup. The meetings would invariably drift onto other topics and go from a 15 minute standup to an hour long discussion about everything going on in the company where the CEO would get involved and try and hash things out. As you can imagine we'd end up doing these at most once a week which became incredibly frustrating trying to get everyone on the same page. On top of that the code base was stuck on XML, JSP/JSTLs, XMPP, Java 7 and Adobe Flex based APIs and libraries. The whole world was moving onto mobile apps, ES5/6, REST-JSON, Websockets, WebRTC and we were stuck using archaic stuff like XMLPullParsers, Flash Remoting and SOAP. Those first 4 years were valuable lessons on what to do and I grew as an engineer, but those last 4 years were definitely lessons on what not to do. But you grow comfortable. I think being comfortable is a dangerous place to be. To quote Jim Rohn I think you have to embrace discomfort and ask yourself 'What am I becoming?' rather than 'What am I getting?' and ensure that you're growing. You don't want one year's experience times 8 - you want 8 years of growth. |
That's a great insight. Thanks for sharing!
Hope you're in a better place now!